Boyan Slat is just 25 – but the future of the ocean and its livability may very well rest in his hands. What sparked his interest in the cause was his finding, during an immersion in Greece, of a huge quantity of plastics compared to the local fish population. Despite being only a sixteen-year-old high schooler, clueless about waste management, he decided to further his knowledge in the field by tackling it in a high school project — inventing a passive collection system which he was able to present at a Tedx in Delft in 2012.

In 2013 he interrupted his studies in aerospace engineering in order to bring his idea to life and he established the startup “the ocean cleanup”, whose mission is to develop and invest in advanced technologies to collect the plastics present in the oceans. The startup was financed through the 2.2 millions he was able to fund raise through 38.000 donations in the world. Despite being ultimately prone to seasickness, Boyan has spent the last five years working on this project, and in September 2019 he finally crowned his dream of seeing his invention in action.

Standing from the shore he observed System 001, a floating barrier nearly 2,000ft long, slithering in the waters under the Golden Gate Bridge, into the Pacific Ocean, Aimee towards the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an agglomerate of plastic waste twice as big as Texas. According to his plan, an array of 60 Systems might reduce the waste in the area by 50% by 2025, exactly ten years after System 101 was heralded by the times as one of the best inventions of the year.

Originally the project involved a large rigid barrier fixed around a central tank envisaged to collect the plastics. The prototype however turned out to be quite different, with an unmanned, modular system that drifts in the water, following the currents, naturally attracting to areas in which the concentration is higher. Looking from up above, it is akin to a pipeline gliding right above the sea, yet beneath the surface is a 10ft deep ‘skirt,’ which snares the plastic amassed by the current.

The solidity of the system, differently from a net, protects sea life from being trapped inside. Slat hopes that plastic will amass as if on a seashore, ready to be stored by boats and brought to recycling facilities to be dismantled and reused. The mission was restarted in June with the employment of a new model, called System 001/B. The company stated in the following October that they had been able to effectively gather plastic waste.

Slat is convinced that his mission is a race against time. As a matter of fact, plastic is subject to breaking down into smaller fragments called microplastics which are harder to detect and can therefore enter in the food chain unnoticed. At present time, however, just 8% of the plastic mass in the Pacific garbage patch is composed of microplastics – as stated by the research carried out by The Ocean cleanup. However, it is very well possible that in the next few decades the remaining 92% will be turned into small pieces of plastics as well, a downright scary thought.

But what about the plastic that will be collected in the process? Scientists estimate that most of it will be single-use plastics that will have to be recycled by specialized companies that will turn it again in the same material. In 2019 Slat hypothesized to turn the collected plastics into goods to be sold in order to finance the Ocean Cleanup’s operations. The products will be manufactured under the Ocean Plastic brand, which is owned by company founder Cyrill Gutsch. Further information on the feasibility of the process however, has yet to be given and many experts are still skeptical about the Ocean Cleanup ability to rid international waters from plastics.