Kia Corporation and global partner The Ocean Cleanup are today celebrating a significant milestone in their joint strategy to tackle plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. Symbolically returning to the port of San Francisco from which the first-generation System 001vessel embarked on its maiden voyage six years ago, The Ocean Cleanup’s current System 03 has completed a significant haul.

Since the establishment of the partnership in 2022, Kia’s support has helped The Ocean Cleanup remove over one million pounds of plastic from the world’s largest accumulation of floating waste – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) – which has an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometers.

In a significant step towards achieving its mission of ridding the world’s oceans of plastic, The Ocean Cleanup has announced a clear timeline to clean up the GPGP. While data gathered during this season’s operations suggests that the GPGP could potentially be cleaned within 10 years thanks to identified technological improvements, the global NGO is pushing boundaries and aims to halve the time needed to clean the GPGP to five years.

Charles Ryu, Senior Vice President and Head of the Global Brand & CX Division at Kia Corporation, said: “All of us at Kia extend our warmest congratulations to The Ocean Cleanup team for its continued dedication and hard work as the only organization actively tackling plastic pollution in the GPGP. We are honored to be a key supporter of its ocean cleanup activities and look forward to an even more ambitious chapter of our partnership as System 03 and operations are improved to shorten the timeline for cleanup.”

In 2025, The Ocean Cleanup will focus on deploying a new hotspot hunting initiative designed to map the “hotspots”, or areas of intense plastic accumulation in the GPGP, to increase the impact of future extractions.

“The Ocean Cleanup is an international non-profit and our operations are reliant on our incredible partnerships”, said Boyan Slat, Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.“Our partnership with Kia is setting a new standard for how organizations can drive real change. Together, we’re proving that innovation and commitment can rid the oceans of plastic and inspire others to follow. The products born from this collaboration will symbolize our shared progress and the tangible impact of sustainable solutions.”

Over the past two and a half years, Kia and The Ocean Cleanup have worked together to reduce plastic pollution. In its first six years of operation, The Ocean Cleanup executed 23 operational trips and completed more than 100 plastic extraction missions. These efforts have removed more than a million pounds of trash, addressing approximately 0.5 percent of the floating plastic pollution in the GPGP.

As part of the collaborative vision to create a circular resource system for ocean plastic, Kia and The Ocean Cleanup have been working together to find new ways of turning plastic waste extracted from the GPGP into durable, useful products. The first item from this initiative, a car accessory for the Kia EV3, will launch in Q4 of this year.

Kia has also been integrating other recycled plastics and eco-friendly materials into its latest models. This includes Kia’s flagship all-electric SUV, the EV9, which utilizes recycled fishing nets in its interior carpet and recycled plastic bottles in its seat fabric. The EV6 also features cloth and matting made from recycled plastics.

To support its broader vision of becoming a pioneer in sustainable mobility, Kia is targeting 20 percent use of recycled plastics in its vehicles by 2030.