After six years of sea trials, environmental group The Ocean Cleanup claims it has proved that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a floating mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas – could be cleaned up in ten years using current technology, at a cost of a mere $7.5 billion. Speaking in San Francisco last Friday, Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO Boyan Slat said that since last May the System 3 collection machine – which uses a 1.4 mile (2.25km)-long boom to scoop plastic into a collecting net – had collected a million pounds (over 450,000kg) of plastic trash, cleaning up an area about the size of New Jersey over 22 trips. That's still only half a percent of the total, but Slat argued that it proved the point that existing tech will do the job.