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James Dyson's vacuums may have conquered living rooms up and down the country, but the inventor is hoping to expand his empire.

The London-based designer is putting his efforts into designing a giant vacuum cleaner to be used on rivers.

Dyson envisions creating a device named the Recyclone barge, which uses the same cyclone technology as Dyson vacuum cleaners.

James Dyson envisions using a device he has named the M.V. Recyclone barge, which uses the same cyclone technology as Dyson vacuum cleaners. The barge would trap plastic floating on the river's surface

The barge would trap plastic floating on the river's surface using large nets, pick it up using a suction system and then separate it for processing.

'By skimming a highly concentrated flow of larger sized plastics in polluted rivers, the M.V. Recyclone would effectively mine a major source of the pollution before it reached the sea,' Dyson told Ben Schiller at FastCoExist.

'Large skim nets unfurl from the rollers at its stern and are anchored on each side of the river. Hydraulic winches wind them in and out.'

The nets then face upstream and skim the surface of the river for floating debris.

The barge design has large nets on its front-end that trap plastic floating on the surface of a river. A suction system then pulls in the waste, where the plastic is separated, shredded and then sent for processing

Dyson explains that the plastic waste is shredded on board, and different grades of plastic are separated by a huge cyclone.

The idea was sketched out for Time, and Dyson said he originally wanted the machine to be fixed at different points along a river.

He claims that the amount of plastic debris in the oceans has grown a hundredfold in the past 40 years, and that much of this isn't biodegradable.

As well as the increased waste, in the past 30 years, plastic production has increased by a 500 per cent.

The entrepreneur believes plastic it in rivers before it heads to the ocean may be a solution to cleaning up the planet. 

The Recyclone barge has not yet been prototyped or tested, but Dyson said he is convinced it can work.

HOW OUR ADDICTION TO PLASTIC IS TURNING THE OCEANS TOXIC

Charles J. Moore, a U.S. merchant marine captain said he is 'utterly shocked' at the massive increase in plastic litter

Plastic. It's one of the most pernicious threats to the future of our planet. We all use it - it's part of our daily lives and has been for 50 years or more.

Although plastic seems innocuous enough, your discarded coffee cup or plastic bag may be slowly killing life in the world's oceans - and, in the process, threatening our own existence on Earth.

In a disturbing report, one of the world's leading experts sounds an urgent alarm on the state of our oceans.

Charles J. Moore, a U.S. merchant marine captain and founder of the Algalita Marine Research Institute in Long Beach, California, says he is 'utterly shocked' at the massive increase in plastic litter found floating on the sea's surface in the past five years.

He suggests it is a greater threat than climate change, adding: 'It's choking our future in ways that most of us are barely aware.'

In the past 30 years, plastic production has increased by an astonishing 500 per cent. Once it was a by-product of petrochemical refining. Now it has become an integral element in human existence.

Captain Moore and his team estimated that, in just three days' sampling, 2.3 billion pieces of plastic - from polystyrene foam to tiny pellets - had flowed from the urban centres of Southern California into its coastal waters