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The Ocean Cleanup Project is continuing to zero in on its primary target, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, today announcing it has leased space at a former naval station to begin assembling its first giant trash-collecting booms. Its team will start putting them together at the San Francisco Bay site, which will double as a basecamp for a launch that has been years in the making.

Dreamt up by one-time aerospace engineering student Boyan Slat, the Ocean Cleanup Project first emerged as an ambitious design concept in 2013. The team has since gone on to raise millions in funding, carried out aerial surveys of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and put a prototype to the test in the Netherlands.

The system has undergone numerous redesigns since its inception, but the general idea is to let natural currents push plastic waste into passive, floating arms, which would be strategically located to gather maximum ocean trash. The Ocean Cleanup Project says marine life would be able to harmlessly pass beneath these floating arms.