The vast collection of garbage, mostly plastic, floating in the earth’s oceans is growing even faster than expected. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more than twice the size of Texas. It could take centuries – 80,000 years, by one estimate – to clean it up. Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old college drop-out, thinks he has a better idea.
Six years ago, the teen-aged Slat presented a TED talk outlining his plan to collect the debris. He says he can gather up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years. Putting money where his mouth is, he crowdfunded $2.2 million and is now the CEO of the non-profit firm Ocean Cleanup. Slat has subsequently raised more than $30 million from other investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. (Perhaps as repentance for Salesforce’s giant dildo office tower that now dominates the San Francisco skyline.)
Ocean Cleanup is launching its initial project, a 2,000 foot long floating tube. The giant tube was assembled at a former naval air station in Alameda, on the San Francisco Bay. The tube is flexible enough to ride with the waves and bend into a U shape, but also rigid enough to stop floating plastic. Attached below is a nylon screen to catch submerged plastic debris, without entangling marine life. Heavy anchors make it move more slowly in the ocean’s current than the plastic it’s gathering. Ocean Cleanup expects this pilot project to entrap and bring ashore five tons of plastic trash per month… a good start on the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the oceans.
Why this instead of taking his talents to some Internet whiz-bang start-up? “I think if you work on something that’s truly exciting and bold and complicated, then you will attract the kind of people that are really smart and talented. People that like solving complicated problems.”
