20-year-old Boyan Slat is a young man who has come up with an idea about how we might be able to clean up our planet's ocean plastic pollution problem. That solution is
The Ocean Cleanup.
About 8 million tons of plastic enters the ocean each year (Jambeck et al., 2015). Part of this accumulates in 5 areas where currents converge: the gyres. At least 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are currently in the oceans (Eriksen et al., 2014), a third of which is concentrated in the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Cózar et al., 2014). This plastic pollution continues to do the following damage in the ages to come:
The pollution in our earth's oceans is well
documented. Slat's idea is simple: instead of us having to go out and find and collect the overwhelming amount of plastic in the ocean, we will let the ocean's natural currents to passively
concentrate the plastic itself.
Slat’s nonprofit, the Ocean Cleanup, says the current will flow underneath those booms, where animals will be carried through safely. The buoyant plastic is funneled above and concentrates at the water’s surface along the barriers for easy gathering and disposal.
Last month, it was announced that this ocean-cleaning system—which the company says is the world’s first—will be deployed in 2016. They’re planning to station it near the Japanese island of Tsushima, situated in between Japan’s Nagasaki prefecture and South Korea. The detritus-catching apparatus will be 6,500 feet wide and is being called the longest floating structure ever placed in the ocean.
The plan is to continue to upscale the floating structures and continue to place them around the world. According to Gizmodo this project started with a crowdfunding campaign begun last year that was able to raise $2 million.
Watch Mr. Slat's TED talk below the fold.