We're not the first people to think about this.
That's important to say up front, because pretending you're the first to discover a problem is the fastest way to repeat someone else's mistakes.
So I went looking for what's been tried in Paraguay. The results were… educational.
Failed attempt #1: The director of the local rowing club told me they actually tried to install an interceptor on their river. The problem? Wrong location, possibly wrong design. The structure ended up flooding the club itself. Project killed.
Failed attempt #2: Other groups have tried interceptors on other rivers. Their interceptors got stolen. Yes — stolen. As in, somebody dragged the structure away. Welcome to public infrastructure in a place where everything that isn't bolted down (and even some things that are) walks off at night.
Failed attempt #3: And then there's the greenwashing crowd. Posing for photos in front of a "river cleanup project" that exists for the press release and not much else. No real measurement, no real iteration, no real results. Theater.
So that's what we're up against: bad designs, theft, and PR projects.
Here's our approach.
Pilot first, scale later. We're starting with a 3-month pilot on one river. Not all three at once. Not a national rollout. One river. Three months. Real data.
Three stages of interception. Trash isn't one thing. It's a spectrum from tree trunks to microplastic. One barrier won't do it. We're designing in three stages. More on that in Post 4.
Iterate in public. Every previous attempt I've found either failed silently or succeeded silently. We're going to document this whole thing — what works, what doesn't, what got stolen, what flooded.
Steal from the best. Two foundations are doing this well: The Ocean Cleanup, who basically invented the modern static interceptor, and Sungai Watch in Bali, whose real innovation isn't the hardware — it's the community model around it. We're learning from both. Hardware from one, behavior change from the other.
The team
This isn't a one-person crusade. We're an association called Marea, with actual structure:
- 5 core members: president, vice-president, treasurer, vocal, secretary
- 3 coordinators: volunteers, projects, communications
- A volunteer base behind them
About me: I'm an industrial designer. I've spent years volunteering at zero-waste organizations and running composting workshops for kids and adults. The design background matters here — an interceptor is a design problem before it's an environmental problem.
And the detail I keep coming back to: I row on the river we're going to intervene in. Every week. So this isn't a project I'll check in on quarterly from an office. I'll see the prototype every time I'm on the water. I'll see it work, fail, clog, get stolen, get rebuilt.
Next post: before we built anything, we did a manual cleanup. What we pulled out surprised us.