Ocean Cleaning Website
Increasing ocean plastic pollution is irreversibly harming ecosystems and human economic activities. We partner with a Dutch NGO, The Ocean Cleanup (TOC), and use optimization to help clean up oceans from plastic faster. In our paper, we optimize the route of their plastic collection system in the ocean to maximize the quantity of plastic collected over time. On one-year ocean data, our optimization-based routing approach increases the quantity of plastic collected by over 60% compared with their current routing strategy, hence speeding up the progress towards plastic-free oceans.
