The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit environmental engineering organization based in the Netherlands that develops and deploys technology to extract plastic pollution from the oceans and to capture it in rivers before it can reach the ocean. Their initial focus was on the Great Pacific garbage patch, later extended to major rivers.

The Ocean Cleanup was founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, a Dutch inventor who serves as its CEO. An estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of floating plastic inhabit the Pacific Gyre, collectively over 80,000 tons.

The river system is anchored within rivers or at rivermouths.

The Ocean Cleanup also publishes scientific papers, and estimates that "1% of worlds rivers (~1,000 rivers) are responsible for 80% of the pollution in the world's seas". They aim to clean these rivers.

As of January 2026, the organization has removed over 50 million kilograms (50,000 metric tons) of material from rivers and the garbage patch.

Slat proposed the cleanup project and supporting system in 2012. In October, he outlined the project in a TED-talk. The initial design consisted of long, floating barriers fixed to the seabed, attached to a central platform shaped like a manta ray for stability. The barriers would direct the floating plastic to the central platform, which would remove the plastic from the water. Slat did not specify the dimensions of this system in the talk.

In 2014, the design replaced the central platform with a tower detached from the floating barriers. This platform would collect the plastic using a conveyor belt. The floating barrier was proposed to be 100 km (62 mi) long. They conducted and published a feasibility study.

In 2015, this design won the London Design Museum Design of the Year, and the INDEX: Award. Later that year, scale model tests were conducted in wave pools at Deltares and MARIN, testing the dynamics and load of the barrier in ocean conditions, and gathering data for computational modeling.