In December 2019, the Ocean Cleanup crew returned from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with its first load of plastic waste gathered from the ocean during a pilot test of its trash-collecting technology (System 001/B.) After this successful load of garbage was acquired, the team came to their next challenge – how to recycle the plastic, so it doesn’t become waste all over again.
The Ocean Cleanup team decided to sell items made from the waste it recovers to fund its ongoing operations to tackle plastic pollution in the marine environment. On October 24, the non-profit unveiled its first product – blue sunglasses. Each pair of Ocean Cleanup sunglasses are made with plastics collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Boyan Slat, the Ocean Cleanup’s founder and CEO, said:
It was actually quite a challenge because this material has sometimes been out there for decades. A lot of this stuff is quite brittle, quite degraded. It’s also very mixed. You see half of it is fishing nets, the other half being more rigid objects, like bottles and crates. So, turning it into a usable material was quite a journey. When we announced that we were going to do this late last year, we didn’t know whether we could do it.
The team worked with several partners to sort through the waste, wash it, shred it, and turn it into certified high-quality plastic pellets that could be used in manufacturing products. “We had to set up a completely new supply chain because this is a material that’s never been processed before,” Slat explained.
These pellets were used to build the sunglass frames; then, polarized lenses were attached along with stainless steel hinges. All the parts are designed to be easily stripped and recycled again at the end of their life cycle. The glasses cost $199 each and also come with a pouch made from recycled PET bottles and a case made from recycled parts of the first trash-catching system.
The Ocean Cleanup team calculates that each pair sold will enable the cleanup of an area the size of 24 football fields from the garbage patch. If it sells all the sunglasses made from their first pile of recovered plastic, it could clean 500,000 football fields worth of plastic.
