Boyan Slat: the man who went out to clean the oceans

I've always sort of been an inventor and a maker so the first thing that I built was when I was two years old. I built my own chair just because I thought a self-built chair would be more fun than one that you could buy in the store. I was just on a family holiday and I decided to get my scuba diving license. I was underwater and then I just saw more plastic bags and fish around me and I thought well that's kind of a disappointment and I asked myself well why can't we clean this up? I had all these different ideas and tried to put them together in a different way in my head until you know there was this basic concept of using these long floating barriers that I thought could work. The way I've approached the the ocean cleanup so far from its inception to now is that it's sort of a spiral and sort of an accelerating spiral staircase going from results then communicating those results and then with that communication raising new resources either people money etc and then with those new resources then that then helps us to get us to the next milestone. Roughly there are five areas in the world where plastic concentrates so these are areas where the ocean currents they converge and the largest one of these areas is in the North Pacific between Hawaii and California. It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Fetch and more than half of the plastic in the world's oceans is accumulated in that one area. So if you were to skim the surface with boats and nets it would take roughly 79,000 years, hundreds of billions of dollars. It would also kill lots of sea life. If you fish you can't just fish the plastic so not such an attractive proposal I think. These ocean currents are constantly in motion so the plastic is drifting around roughly in circles. Then I wondered well can't we use that in our advantage? Why would you go after the plastic if the plastic can also come to you? If you have these floating cleanup systems floating around and you have the plastic floating around, if they all go at the same speed then the plastic would never be caught of course because it would just act like a piece of plastic and they would never meet. So the way we solve that is by using the differences in speed in between different water layers. So at the surface of the ocean the water is actually moving quite fast but then if you go only a few hundred meters deeper you already get to just a fraction of the speed of the water. What we do is in this deeper water layer we suspend a very large anchor, it's about 100 meters in size, which creates enough drag on the system so that the system effectively moves slower than the plastic so that way the plastic is able to accumulate against this floating barrier. The basic idea I think to be successful, to have any chance, it has to be very simple because eventually the number of problems that can occur scales quadratically with the number of components. So by keeping the design extremely simple I think it actually has a fair chance of surviving at the ocean for 20 years. Indeed we have a team, it's pretty small, so we're currently with about 75 people on staff, about 10 of them are focused on the recycling part and the idea is that we can recycle the plastic back into high value material and then we partner with B2C companies and sell that plastic to them. So once those cleanup systems are out there then the idea is that they can actually fund themselves by taking the plastic out, recycling that and selling this at the premium. Now we've been able to calculate that with a fleet of 60 of these cleanup systems deployed for five years we can clean up 50 percent of the of this great pacific garbage.