Boyan Slat

It will be very hard to convince everyone in the world to handle their plastics responsibly, but what we humans are very good at, is inventing technical solutions to our problems.

– Boyan Slat

Slat believes that there can be a technological solution to the environmental problems the world is facing. Slat's idea is to exploit the circulating ocean currents to clean up plastic waste in the ocean. Below you see two illustrations of Slat's idea for cleaning up the ocean.

You go to a beach, you see a lot of plastic. It's out of the ocean, it stays out of the ocean, so that's good. But the thing is that in this Great Pacific garbage patch, this area twice the size of Texas, there's simply no coastlines to collect plastic. So the idea is to have these very long floating barriers.

– Boyan Slat

The mission of the organisation the Ocean Cleanup is to develop technology to clean the oceans. The Ocean Cleanup is funded through donations and sponsors. The organisation has tested prototypes in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but so far the trials have encountered problems.

The Ocean Cleanup has also developed technology to stop plastic pollution from entering the ocean from rivers. The organisation claims that 80% of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from 1000 rivers. Two successful prototypes have been deployed to rivers in Indonesia and Malaysia and more are planned for Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. The system, called the Inceptor, collects plastic waste onto barges that can then be towed away and emptied. The Inceptor is solar powered and operates autonomously.

In the TED Talk “How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves,” Boyan Slat describes his ideas for cleaning up the oceans.

To watch the video, search online for “How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves: Boyan Slat at TEDxDelft.”

To truly rid the oceans of plastic, what we need to do is two things: One, we need to clean up the legacy pollution, the stuff that has been accumulating for decades and doesn't go away by itself. But, two, we need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.

– Boyan Slat