The Ocean Cleanup launches new tool to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Six years ago, young entrepreneur Boyan Slat launched The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation to clean plastic from our oceans. He built a massive cleaning device, and the first one was deployed to the Pacific Ocean in 2018, to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch— a 2,000-foot-long U-shaped array known as "Wilson".

However, he has run into a problem and is struggling to clean the trash-filled vortex that’s more than twice the size of Texas, and growing with more than 1.8 trillion pieces of floating plastic. Instead of cleaning the vortex, the device started spilling plastic back into the ocean, and was brought home for repairs.

The problem was later traced to a design and manufacturing flaw that generated a crack at the bottom of the pipe, which widened into fracture.

A new and improved device has now again ventured out to the Garbage Patch. Read more about it here.

Watch the 2018 model explained below.