Cleaning the World’s Oceans – Boyan Slat of The Ocean Cleanup

It's really important that as engineers and inventors that we always develop technologies of which the positive effects are larger than the negative side effects. By stacking those inventions on top of each other, eventually you get to a world that will be many times better than it is today. When I was 16 years old, I was scuba diving in Greece expecting to see all these beautiful things. I was really disappointed because I saw more plastic bags than fish. And I just asked myself, why can't we clean this up? Everyone told me it would be impossible. But to me, massive problems are more fun to work on. Halfway between Hawaii and California is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world. Every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the world's oceans. According to the UN, this is about $13 billion per year vessel damage, damage to fishing, as well as pollution on beaches which needs to be cleaned up. All these large things will crumble down into small pieces to enter the food chain. That's a food chain that includes us humans. You're five days away from civilization. You just look around you and you see all this plastic floating around. The plastic doesn't really go away by itself. Some of this has been floating around for decades. I think you can either be sort of part of the problem or part of the solution. I'd rather be part of the solution. When people say something is impossible, the sheer absoluteness of that statement should be a motivation to investigate more. I think I've really been an inventor all my life. I wondered, well, why would you go after the plastic if the plastic could come to you? What I came up with is a fleet of floating barriers that roam around the ocean but move slower than the plastic, purely powered by the winds, the currents, and the waves. These automatically drift to those areas where most plastic is. The system acts like the plastic. We see the plastic as a resource. We look beyond the problem and see the financial value. We will be collecting a lot of plastic, which we can recycle, sell, and fund the operational expenditures of the cleanup. With a fleet of 50 of these systems, we should be able to clean up 50% of the garbage patch in just the next five years. What I really hope is that the ocean cleanup can become a symbol of how we use technology, working with nature to solve the big challenges of our time. 20, 25 years from now, I think we could really get to an ocean that is virtually clean again.