The Ocean Cleanup | Macquarie Group

The largest ocean cleanup in history

Through $A50 million in grant funding the Macquarie 50th Anniversary Award proudly supported five organisations addressing areas of significant social need through bold projects that promise lasting community benefit.

The Ocean Cleanup is an international non-profit project with the mission of ridding the oceans of plastic by expanding and scaling up its trash-capturing solutions in both oceans and rivers.

500,600 kilos

of floating ocean plastic removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch over 23 trips¹

20 million kilos

of trash removed from ocean feeding rivers in eight countries across 21 deployments¹

Successfully developed

a scalable and operational ocean cleanup system¹

The Ocean Cleanup is dedicated to advancing and expanding its innovative cleanup system to remove plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). With support from the Macquarie 50^th Anniversary Award, The Ocean Cleanup has successfully iterated and deployed a scalable, operational system. As of late 2024, their systems have completed 23 trips to the GPGP, removing over 500,600 kilograms of floating ocean plastic.¹

To prevent plastic emissions from entering oceans via rivers, The Ocean Cleanup has also developed and deployed a system of Interceptors™ in several of the world’s most heavily polluted rivers. These Interceptors™ capture and extract floating riverine plastic before it can reach the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup has identified that the 1,000 most polluting rivers are responsible for 80 per cent of global plastic emissions, and they aim to implement Interceptors™ as a solution for all of them. Since 2019, 21 Interceptors™ have been launched in 8 countries, removing a total of 20 million kilograms of rubbish.¹

To ensure long-term organisational sustainability and growth, a portion of the Macquarie 50th Anniversary Award funding was allocated toward expanding The Ocean Cleanup’s partnership and funding team, which now comprises 12 people. Since 2019, the organisation has secured $A300 million in funding to support the organisation’s future goals and initiatives.¹

The grant has contributed greatly to our Rivers and Oceans program in general, and further, we have been able to build up a larger funding and partnership team, helping us attract additional funders to further our work.”

Nisha Bakker
Director of Fundraising
The Ocean Cleanup

A highlight for me has been leveraging my professional skills in a new context. I had the opportunity to work directly with The Ocean Cleanup’s finance team to provide insights into budgets and financial metrics. I was thrilled to be able to draw upon what I have learned at Macquarie to support the development of an organisation whose mission resonates with me personally.”

Alex Helliwell
Digital Solutions Owner for Sustainability
Macquarie Asset Management, London

The future for The Ocean Cleanup

Enhancing ocean cleanup efficiency: The Ocean Cleanup is committed to improving the efficiency of its operations in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). By leveraging advanced technologies such as drones, satellites, and AI software, the organisation aims to better understand the behaviour of the GPGP and predict the locations of plastic accumulations. This will enable more targeted deployment of their cleanup systems more effectively, enhancing overall efficiency.
Acquiring independent operational capabilities: The Ocean Cleanup is building the case to acquire their own ships to deploy and operate the Interceptors™ system independently within the GPGP. This move will allow the organisation to have greater control and flexibility in their cleanup efforts.
Scaling river cleanup efforts: In its river cleanup initiatives, The Ocean Cleanup plans to scale-up operations to 30 cities over the next five years. This ambitious goal aims to remove over one-third of the plastic pollution flowing from rivers into the oceans, significantly reducing plastic emissions overall.

In this video, hear from Dan van der Kooy, Senior Video Producer for The Ocean Cleanup as he captures the largest ocean clean up currently taking place around the world, and explains how the Interceptors™, a 100% solar-powered autonomous machine, is helping.

Project updates

FY2024

The Ocean Cleanup's System 03 brought a record haul of plastic to shore, returning back to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for another season starting in February 2024. Since 2019, a total of 389,350 kilograms of plastic has now been removed from the Patch.

In March 2024, Interceptor 019 in Bangkok became the latest addition to the Rivers portfolio (technology solutions that intercept plastics in rivers before it reaches the ocean), while the very first Interceptor in Indonesia celebrated its five-year anniversary. To date, Interceptors have removed over 12 million kilograms of trash, working with local communities and stakeholders to prevent this rubbish from reaching the Ocean.

In early 2023, a new fundraising platform was launched, making it easier than ever for people to get involved and support the Ocean Cleanup to help rid the oceans of plastic.

FY2023

In FY2023, The Ocean Cleanup conducted eight trips into the GPGP, removing 153,000 kilos of plastic from the ocean. This year also started the phased scale up of ocean System 002 to System 03 – a larger system capable of collecting much greater volumes of plastic.⁴

New Interceptor deployments or trials were launched in Guatemala and Jamaica; across the seven countries where the Interceptors are in place (with more deployments scheduled for late 2023), which prevented more than 1,800 megatonnes of trash from reaching the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup also sold out their stock of The Ocean Cleanup Sunglasses – made with plastic extracted directly from the GPGP and raising sufficient funds to clean up over 500,000 football fields’ worth of ocean.¹

FY2022

In FY2022, the Ocean Cleanup made substantial progress in their mission to rid the world’s oceans and rivers of plastic, pioneering ground-breaking research, reaching proof of technology with their latest ocean system (System 002), and deploying new Interceptor solutions that prevent plastic from entering the ocean from rivers in Dominican Republic, Malaysia, Jamaica and Vietnam.¹

FY2021

Meet the other winners

Last Mile Health

Monash University’s World Mosquito Program

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute World Scabies Program

Social Finance

Data and impact reporting is supplied by The Ocean Cleanup as at March 2025. The data is not independently verified and represents activities undertaken by The Ocean Cleanup with support from Macquarie Group Foundation for the full length of the grant period (August 2019 – March 2025).