Originally published 2016-12-18.
Richard Hardiman
The WasteShark is a small, battery-powered robotic boat that skims floating rubbish off the surface of harbours, marinas, canals and lakes. It was designed by the South African-born entrepreneur Richard Hardiman, whose company RanMarine Technology tested early prototypes in the Port of Rotterdam from late 2016. Rather than chasing plastic across the open ocean, it works where litter gathers before it reaches the sea: in sheltered water close to cities.
Here is how it works, what it can and cannot do, and why catching rubbish near the shore matters for the bigger ocean plastic problem.
How the WasteShark works
The design is a twin-hulled catamaran with an open “mouth” between the hulls. As the drone moves forward, water and floating debris flow into a basket that sits at the waterline, and early reports said the opening reached about a foot below the surface. Bottles, wrappers, food containers, bits of polystyrene and drifting plant matter are trapped while water drains away. Hardiman himself has likened it to a Roomba for water, which is a fair picture.
Operators can steer it by remote control or send it along programmed routes, and later versions use GPS and sensors to follow set paths and avoid obstacles. Because it is electric, it produces no exhaust or oil leaks while it works, and it is quiet enough not to disturb a busy waterfront.
Capacity figures vary between models and sources. Coverage of the first prototypes said it could gather about 1,100 pounds (500 kg) of rubbish, while later reports, such as Euronews in 2023, put a good day’s haul at the equivalent of around 21,000 plastic bottles. Either way, the basket has to be emptied regularly, which means the real daily total depends on how quickly people can unload it and recharge the battery.
From Cape Town to Rotterdam
Hardiman has said the idea came while watching rubbish drift around the harbour in Cape Town, where he lived. Crews in small boats with nets were collecting it by hand, slowly and at real cost. A small autonomous craft that could patrol the same water seemed an obvious upgrade.
The first prototype was built and tested in Cape Town before the company moved to the Netherlands, and in 2016 the company handed four prototype WasteSharks to the Port of Rotterdam Authority for a year-long trial in the harbour, Europe’s largest port. The goal was to catch waste in the port before tides and currents carried it out into the North Sea.
Richard Hardiman
Since those trials the company has refined the drone and sold it to ports, cities and waterway managers in several countries. It won a CES Innovation Award in 2022, and South African outlets later reported a WasteShark at work at the Royal Cape Yacht Club in Cape Town, where the idea began.
Why clean harbours instead of the open ocean?
Most plastic in the sea starts on land. It is blown from streets and bins, washed into storm drains and carried by rivers into estuaries and harbours. Sheltered water close to cities is a bottleneck where that waste concentrates and is still easy to reach. Catching a bottle in a canal is far simpler and cheaper than catching the fragments it would break into after years at sea.
That is why the WasteShark should be judged as a tool for ports and waterways, not as a fix for mid-ocean pollution. It cannot handle open-ocean waves, and it does nothing about the tiny particles called microplastics, which make up a huge share of plastic pieces in the sea.
Getting the ocean-plastic facts right
Stories about this drone were often wrapped in dramatic statistics. A few need correcting or context.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not an island
The patch between California and Hawaii is often described as a floating island twice the size of Texas. There is no solid island. Research led by The Ocean Cleanup in 2018 estimated that the area of concentrated debris covers about 1.6 million square kilometres, with around 80,000 tonnes of plastic spread thinly through the water; the organisation now puts the figure at about 100,000 tonnes. Much of it by weight is lost fishing gear, and most of the pieces are small. The twice-Texas comparison roughly matches the area, but the image of a walkable trash island is wrong.
Wildlife death figures
The claim that pollution kills a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year is repeated widely and is often attributed to UNESCO, but it is a rough, old estimate rather than a precise count. The often-added figure of 300,000 dead dolphins and porpoises comes from a different problem altogether: WWF uses a similar number for whales, dolphins and porpoises that die each year after being caught accidentally in fishing gear. Entanglement in discarded nets is related, but it is not the same as floating litter.
Robots still need people
Early coverage described the drones as patrolling day and night without oversight. In reality they need charging, emptying, maintenance and someone responsible for where they go, and what they collect has to be sorted and disposed of properly. Automation makes a crew more productive; it does not remove the crew.
What a cleanup drone can realistically achieve
Hardiman has always presented the WasteShark as a way to buy time, not as the answer. A line widely attributed to him in early coverage puts it plainly: “my mission will only truly be accomplished when I’m ‘out of business.’” In other words, the real success would be less plastic entering the water at all.
Used well, small drones like this can keep a harbour or canal visibly cleaner, reduce the litter that drifts out to sea, and gather data about what kinds of waste turn up and where. Some versions carry sensors that measure water quality as they go, which helps managers spot pollution sources.
The bigger gains come upstream. Better waste collection, deposit-return schemes for bottles, river barriers that trap litter, and less single-use packaging stop rubbish before it ever needs fishing out. A cleanup robot works best as the last line in that chain.
Watch the WasteShark at work
The short video that first accompanied this story showed a prototype gliding through Rotterdam’s harbour, collecting debris as it went.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
RanMarine’s own channels and news pages show newer WasteShark models working in ports and city waterways if you want to see the drone in action.
Sources: Photos: Richard Hardiman / RanMarine. Popular Science; RanMarine Technology; Euronews (2023); Daily Maverick (2022); The Ocean Cleanup on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; WWF on bycatch; first shared via True Activist.
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