The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch nonprofit famous for sweeping plastic out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has opened a new front much closer to home: the rivers of Los Angeles. The group has begun deploying its trash-trapping Interceptors in Ballona Creek and the LA River, with the explicit goal of cleaning both waterways before the 2028 Summer Olympics arrive.
The project is part of a partnership with the city of Los Angeles, county flood control engineers and local environmental groups. By 2028, organizers want visiting athletes and millions of tourists to see a noticeably cleaner river system — and Olympic broadcasts to feature water instead of plastic bottles.
How the Interceptors work
The Ocean Cleanup's Interceptors are part barrier, part conveyor belt. A long floating boom is anchored across a river, angled to funnel debris toward a moored catamaran-like vessel. As trash drifts in, a conveyor lifts it onto the boat, where it is sorted into dumpsters that are swapped out when full.
Each Interceptor can capture up to 50 metric tons of plastic and other floating waste per day during heavy storm flows. Crucially, the system is solar powered, autonomous and designed to leave fish and wildlife free to pass underneath the barrier.
"Rivers are the arteries that carry plastic into the ocean," the group has said repeatedly. "If you fix the rivers, you fix a huge chunk of the problem before it ever gets to the sea."
Why LA was chosen
Roughly 80% of ocean plastic enters the sea through about 1,000 rivers worldwide, according to research the group has helped publish. The LA River and Ballona Creek are not in that global top tier by volume, but they are among the most visible urban waterways in the United States — and they drain directly into the Pacific, dumping debris along iconic beaches from Marina del Rey to Santa Monica.
Storm season is brutal on the system. A single winter downpour can flush thousands of bottles, food wrappers, polystyrene chunks and fragments of fishing gear down the concrete channels, where most of it has historically ended up in the surf or on beaches. Existing trash booms catch some of it, but the new Interceptors are expected to dramatically increase the volume removed.
An Olympic deadline
The Los Angeles 2028 Games will use venues across the basin, including the Long Beach waterfront for sailing and Santa Monica for triathlon and open-water events. Organizers want to avoid the kind of headlines that dogged earlier Olympics held near polluted bays.
"By 2028, we want every athlete arriving in Los Angeles to feel that they are competing in a city that has taken its water seriously," one project partner said. The goal is not just a cleanup blitz before the Games but a permanent system that keeps working after the Olympic flame is extinguished.
Tracking the haul
The Ocean Cleanup says each kilogram of plastic removed will be logged, photographed and weighed. The data will be shared publicly so residents can watch the numbers climb in real time — an approach the group has used in other Interceptor deployments in Indonesia, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam.
For Angelenos who have spent decades watching trash wash down concrete channels with every storm, the change is already visible. The river will not become pristine overnight, but for the first time, the city has a coordinated, well-funded plan to actually stop the flow — and a global event giving it a hard deadline.
