http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/ocean-plastic-cleanup-rubbish-seas-take-out-23-year-old-boyan-slat-north-sea-pacific-microplastics-a7880321.html
Described as a “ticking time bomb” by marine scientists, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is believed to have grown by five times in the past 10 years and will become a greater risk to life as the plastic degrades further.
It’s a problem that caught the imagination of a then 16-year-old schoolboy from the Netherlands, Boyan Slat. Slat was on holiday in Greece when a diving trip brought him face-to-face with the problem of ocean plastics.
“I could see more plastic bags than fish on that scuba dive,” he says.
“I had to do a high-school science project that year and I decided to really dedicate myself to this issue. Everybody told me it would be impossible to clean up, the main problem being that the plastic is extremely dispersed... over a wide area.”
He dropped out of a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in order to pursue the idea, but the initial reception was not positive. Slat contacted 300 companies looking for support but only one replied, telling him it was “a terrible idea”.
A hugely popular TED Talk saw the teenage Boyan gain worldwide fame, and funding for his designs soon followed, some of it crowd-funded, and some of it from high-profile investors such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.
The key idea that makes Slat’s concept different to other schemes is the principle of “letting the sea do the work” by having ocean currents run into V-shaped screens that filter out small plastics. When the system is fully operational, the plastics can then be loaded onto small vessels and taken back to land for recycling.
Today the Ocean Clean Up Foundation employs more than 70 people and has around $30m (£23m) in funding. But the task confronting Slat and his team will require a great deal more than this.
