A mishap-plagued multimillion dollar project to clean up ocean pollution is now on hold for up to a year.

The Ocean Cleanup project — in which a floating solar-powered barrier was supposed to suck up trash between California and Hawaii — broke apart and was towed to shore for repair earlier this week, according to NBC.com

The nautical no-no caused a large pipe near the machine’s 2,000-foot-long flotsam-catching screen to fall off.

It comes two weeks after the device already failed to hold the plastic debris it caught — accidentally spilling trash back into the sea.

“Of course there is slight disappointment, because we hoped to stay out there a bit longer to do more experiments and to….solve the [plastic] retention issue,” Boyan Slat, the 24-year-old inventor who launched the project, told NBC.com. “But there is no talk whatsoever about discouragement.”

“This is an entirely new category of machine that is out there in extremely challenging conditions,” he said.

The device, which was torn apart by wind and waves, will be towed 800 miles to Hawaii. It will then be repaired or sent by barge to its port in Alameda, Calif, according to NBC.

A spokesman for the project told The Post it would be repaired in “several months,” and working again by the end of the year.

Slat, who works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, wants to eventually send 60 of the machines to skim trash off the sea’s surface.

The glitches are a setback — but he’s not giving up on the $360 million plan, he said.

“We always took into account that we might have to take it back and forth a few times. So it’s really not a significant departure from the original plan.”

But one ocean expert called the breakdown predictable.

“I certainly hope they will be able to get it to work, but this is a very difficult environment where equipment breaks, which is why you normally do things closer to shore, where things are easier to repair,” said Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Slat has raised more than $40 million from tech entrepreneurs and donors since he unveiled the project idea five years ago.

In September, a ship towed the device to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating island of trash the size of Texas.