Young Man Who Said He Could Make The Ocean Clean Itself Was Right

When he was just 18 years old, Boyan Slat climbed up on the stage at a TEDx Talk conference and gave his first talk about cleaning up the ocean. He laid out this idea of cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one enormous and ever growing island of plastic and all sorts of garbage in the north Pacific Ocean. First discovered by sailor and ocean researcher Charles Moore when he was participating in the Transpacific Yacht Race, the island came to be because of the effects of a gyre, which is a swirling vortex of ocean currents, that draw the trash together.

Now 23 years of age, the young man who began building engineering projects since the age of two and really impressed the world when he scored a Guinness World Record at the age of 14 when launched 213 water rockets simultaneously, Boyan founded the The Ocean Cleanup in 2013. They develop tech that would rid the ocean of plastic waste.

After raising $2.2 million, Boyan’s organization launched a massive research in 2014. They studied the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to prepare for the full-scale deployment in 2020. Using the data acquired, they developed technology and set out to launch the first cleanup system in the middle of this year. Their goal is to rid the ocean of half of the debris in five years time.

Samples from the waste were removed from the Pacific and transported to a facility in the Netherlands, where they were analyzed further and sorted to help develop Boyan’s ocean cleaning technology. With the data collected, they created a free floating device anchored at a needed level, so that it may move slower than the waste it will be collecting.

Fascinating, isn’t it?