Fishing for Litter is a concept project to collect plastic litters out of rivers before they reach the ocean. It’s like a barrier network that consists of 3 parts: barrier catchers, pickup vessel, and cleaning stations. Dedicated for Central Europe, the barrier catchers can be positioned close to the river outfall of the Elbe river where there’s a cleaning station located close to the northern and southern riverbanks, and a pickup vessel will collect waste from the catchers, delivering it to the designated area.

The floating barrier network system features a length of 1km and a width of 1.5km, this is enough to cover a vast area of the river to make sure most of plastic waste/debris is caught. Around this area, catchers can be positioned within every 150m.

Designer : Katharina Manz

How Fishing for Litter works?
The barrier catchers would be filled with plastic waste and it has to be physically extracted via a vessel. An ocean sweeper is a good solution to transport plastic out of those catchers into the cleaning station. There’s a conveyor belt system that would automatically filter plastic out of the water, and when it’s done, a small vessel would carry that waste to the designated area to be processed further.