It had rained all morning across Jakarta on the first Tuesday in February. The rivers in the Indonesian capital quickly filled up, carrying all kinds of debris toward the Java Sea. In one of the city’s largest waterways, a Dutch-made device was trapping some of the trash to prevent it from washing out into the ocean. The Interceptor 001 had been shipped to Jakarta in early 2019 by its inventor, the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based nonprofit organization The Ocean Cleanup.

The prototype has been on a trial run since May 2019 near the mouth of the Cengkareng drain. It’s a good location, as the drain connects the city’s notoriously garbage-laden Angke River to the Java Sea.

Jakarta’s prototype is the first generation of a device that The Ocean Cleanup aims to deploy in 1,000 of the world’s most polluted rivers in just five years. The organization estimates these waterways are responsible for carrying 80% of ocean trash out to sea. And the remaining 20% of marine trash comes from around 30,000 other rivers.

The Ocean Cleanup has currently installed one Interceptor on the Klang River in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. According to Chris Worp, The Ocean Cleanup’s managing director, the group plans to deploy another Interceptor to the Rio Ozama in the Dominican Republic this month. And the company will deploy a fourth in Southern Vietnam.

Donors from all over the world have invested millions of dollars in The Ocean Cleanup to help the organization accomplish what it says are “ambitious” and “novel” solutions to the scourge of oceangoing trash. But the process has not been smooth necessarily.

The Ocean Cleanup Faces Serious Allegations

Mongabay visited the prototype in Jakarta in February and found issues with the device. Now, The Ocean Cleanup faces allegations that it copied another successful river cleanup device patented over a decade ago.

The Ocean Cleanup has an ambitious goal to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, what seems to be a noble goal. But a competitor alleges the company has copied its designs. Photo Credit: The Ocean Cleanup

The river-cleaning project is part of The Ocean Cleanup’s overall goal to reduce the amount of trash in the ocean. CEO Boyan Slat founded the organization in 2013 to create an open-ocean device. His mission? That he could remove all the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.

Many iterations and much media attention later, a 525-foot test design was born. And it collected and retained ocean plastic for the first time in October of last year.

Over the course of the project, many scientists encouraged the organization to focus its efforts on rivers. They believed a cleanup device would be more effective there. The Ocean Cleanup took heed in 2015, when it began developing the Interceptor.

Solar panels atop the white exterior shell power the Interceptor. Each device’s unique number is painted on one of its long sleek sides, facing to the banks of the river.

Some Interesting Details About the Interceptor

At water level, a long waste barrier protrudes upstream, allowing the force of the current to push trash toward the device’s mouth. There, a conveyor belt lifts debris out of the water and deposits it onto a platform inside the device that shuttles trash to one of six dumpsters. Once the containers are full, a local team takes them to shore to be emptied.

The latest Interceptor design can extract 50,000 kilograms (110,000 pounds) of plastic per day — double that under “optimal conditions” — and can hold 50 cubic meters (1,770 cubic feet) of garbage, according to The Ocean Cleanup’s website. The prototype in Jakarta has about one-fourth to one-fifth that capacity, and holds the trash in small crates instead of dumpsters. As a result, it needs to be maintained and emptied more frequently.

During the Interceptor’s splashy unveiling event last October in Rotterdam, Slat called it the first “integrated system that you can bring anywhere in the world and install within days.”

That’s just not so, according to John Kellett, founder and president of Clearwater Mills LLC. In 2014, Kellett installed a device called the Waterwheel Powered Trash Interceptor in the Jones River in Baltimore, Maryland. This device, dubbed “Mr. Trash Wheel,” uses booms to funnel trash to its mouth and a conveyor belt to lift trash out of the water.

Key Differences Between The Ocean Cleanup and Competing Technology

A key difference from The Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptor is that a water wheel powers the conveyor belt and solar-powered water pumps keep the wheel going when the current is weak. Due to its success, Baltimore now has three trash wheels, and Clearwater Mills is working in California, Texas and Panama to bring its design worldwide.

“They were aware of our efforts, experience and success when they developed their river device in secret and publicly dismissed it while borrowing heavily from our technology,” Kellett told Mongabay of The Ocean Cleanup.

In an email addressing these claims that Kellett shared with Mongabay, he informed The Ocean Cleanup that Clearwater Mills had patented its device’s design more than a decade ago. Kellett also told The Ocean Cleanup that he thought their changes “make it more expensive, less effective and harder to maintain.”

A Clash of Opinions Emerges

“We would love to see that the resources and efforts allocated to this global crisis are used effectively and that we are not duplicating efforts or working at cross purposes,” he told Mongabay.

The Waterwheel Powered Trash Interceptor, also known as “Mr. Trash Wheel,” temporarily sported large googly eyes in 2015. Three such devices are now operating in Baltimore, Maryland. Image courtesy of Clearwater Mills LLC.

Worp acknowledged that the two devices share similar elements, but said The Ocean Cleanup started its design from scratch. “It would be like saying one car is the same as all the others,” he said. “We obviously know about the other systems that are out there, but we’ve really taken this from a different angle to find a scalable, high capacity, high efficiency solution.”

According to Kellett, The Ocean Cleanup has approached some of the organizations that Clearwater Mills is working with outside Baltimore to offer them an Interceptor instead. Worp denied this, and told Mongabay that his team doesn’t see any other solutions as competitive.

Both Companies Hope to Involve the Public in Cleaning Trash

For both organizations, finding a solution to river pollution goes beyond the cleanup devices.

“They’re providing an opportunity to educate the public and inspire people to become part of the solution,” Kellett said of the three devices his company deployed in Baltimore, which have spurred countless local environmental activities and educational programs.

According to Worp, several school groups have visited the Interceptor prototype in Jakarta. Community engagement is important to The Ocean Cleanup because it ultimately relies on local organizations to operate and maintain the devices.

Scientists Remain Alert

Some scientists are skeptical about The Ocean Cleanup’s goal of targeting so many rivers in vastly different parts of the world. Andrew Gray, a hydrologist at the University of California, Riverside, studies small mountainous watersheds that expel a large amount of sediment to the ocean during strong storms. These storms can be destructive to any man-made device, he said.

“[These storms] that are probably discharging most of the plastics, are the kinds of events that you’re not going to have a trash boom up because the hydrodynamics are far too aggressive,” he said.

Gray also said the Interceptor would need to be incredibly versatile to accommodate a variety of river sizes.

Win Cowger, a graduate student in Gray’s lab, pointed out the unpredictability of natural systems.

“Whenever you apply one solution — one device — to a broad range of ecosystems and a broad range of circumstances, it tends to have some implications that you might not have expected,” he said.

Rainy Days Hit Jakarta

Early this year, Jakarta experienced one of its worst flooding disasters in recent years. Torrential rain showered Greater Jakarta for almost 16 hours through New Year’s Eve and into New Year’s Day. Most of the city’s rivers flooded their surroundings. The Interceptor was found damaged after its waste barrier broke loose.

Heavy rains make it difficult for the Interceptor to work as planned. Photo Credit: Seika

The water volume in the Cengkareng drain increased significantly, but never overflowed its banks, according to Muhammad Khusen, the leader of a waste-collecting worker group in the subdistrict where the Interceptor is located. He said it was the river’s strong current that damaged the device’s waste barrier. However, The Ocean Cleanup’s engineers were able to repair it the following day.

When Mongabay visited the device a few weeks later, in February, the rains were constant. Albeit, they were less intense than at the start of the year. While the Interceptor was undamaged, waste piled up on the barrier and clogged the device’s opening.

Workers were using long poles to try to break up the clog, which included a lot of large organic material. Branches, bamboo and banana tree trunks, and debris were fed bit by bit into the Interceptor.

The Ocean Cleanup Faces Difficulties Collecting Trapped Debris From its Interceptor

A team of three workers has been assigned to collect the trash and maintain the device every day, Khusen said. But on the day of Mongabay’s visit, he had to call in reinforcements. As many as 10 workers stood by that afternoon to help clean up the collected debris. After all, an earlier attempt failed to get much done.

And when the workers went home at 3 p.m., only about 20% of the trapped debris had been taken out.

Workers and officials told Mongabay it was impractical to collect all of the trapped debris. In large part, that’s because of the configuration of the device. For instance, Khusen said the waste-trapping barrier was so thin that his crew couldn’t stand on it to push or pull the debris into the device’s mouth. He said he preferred pontoon-style barriers they can stand on.

Another challenge is the 2-meter (6.6-foot) opening of the processor. Khusen has mentioned it is too small for large waste to freely pass. Sometimes, he said, he has to call in additional human resources to handle big items. For instance, sofas, spring beds, and even a dead cow has turned up.

The Ocean Cleanup Can Still Improve its Interceptor

“I thought this device was sophisticated,” Khusen told Mongabay. “Apparently, there’s still so much manual work needed. I’d say it still has a lot of shortfalls.”

Lambas Sigalingging, head of operations at the North Jakarta water department, shared similar sentiments. Lambas said the device’s lack of movement made it unsuitable for rivers in Jakarta. By his line of reasoning, Jakartan rivers rarely have much current unless it rains.

“So, if we don’t [actively] catch the debris, how is it going to clean itself? Meanwhile, the Interceptor is standing still,” he told Mongabay in a phone interview. “This device would be effective, I think, if the current was strong.”

Lambas said Jakarta’s environment agency owns three waste-trapping barriers installed upstream from the Interceptor in the Cengkareng drain. His own team operates other devices in the city’s rivers, including garbage-collecting boats made by the German company BERKY, excavators, and floating polyethylene barriers. Some of these needed less labor to operate than the Interceptor, he said.

Lambas Shares Some Thoughts on the Interceptor

Workers load trash collected by The Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptor prototype onto a truck for disposal in Jakarta in February 2020. Image by Basten Gokkon/Mongabay.

Lambas said he has shared the challenges his team faces operating the Interceptor with The Ocean Cleanup team at meetings. But he said he hasn’t seen much improvement to the device yet. According to Lambas, The Ocean Cleanup extended the device’s trial run twice — first until December and then until this April.

“But I must stress this with you: I’m not the one to say whether the Interceptor is effective or efficient,” Lambas said. “I can’t answer that because there’s the [The Ocean Cleanup] research team that assesses its efficiency and effectiveness.”

Worp said the Interceptor is effective in the Cengkareng drain and has removed a large amount of trash that the booms upstream could not. He also told Mongabay that The Ocean Cleanup is talking with operators in Jakarta to assess what happened during the heavy rains earlier this year.

He added that his team does indeed respond to feedback from workers. For example, he said, The Ocean Cleanup replaced labor-intensive collection bags with crates last year.

The Ocean Cleanup is Looking for Ways to Improve and Scale

He also reiterated that the device in Jakarta is a prototype. And so the lessons learned from it have led to adjustments to the second generation of Interceptors. (For instance, the ability to accommodate larger debris loads.)

The Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptor prototype in Jakarta in February, 2020. Image by Basten Gokkon/Mongabay.

However, he admitted the Interceptor will not suit every river. “It is definitely not the solution for all, and we will be looking at further solutions as we tackle more and more rivers going forward,” he said.

According to The Ocean Cleanup’s website, the company is now coordinating with governments globally to begin deploying Interceptors on a large scale.

This article was originally published at Mongabay, lightly revised, and republished at theRising with permission.