Can the ocean clean itself?

You’ve heard about the North Pacific garbage patch, the Internet videos are revolting.

Most of it is plastic that slowly deteriorates and makes its way into fish, eventually becoming an unintended seafood additive.

It was while scuba diving that this young man decided enough was enough, “While diving in Greece, I came across more plastic bags than fish.”

His name is Boyan Slat, and as a high school student in Holland he came up with an idea for cleaning up the trash soup.

Instead of sending ships to scoop it all up, which would be extremely expensive, besides taking thousands of years, he takes advantage of the circular ocean currents that created the garbage patches in the first place.

He does this by anchoring stationary, V-shaped floating booms in such a way that the current itself funnels the garbage into the elbow of the “V” where a conveyor belt would continuously lift it into a floating silo for recycling.

“Using a single, 100-kilometer (belt) for 10 years, almost half the plastic in the North Pacific Garbage patch can be removed,” he said.

One hundred km? That’s a 60-mile long garbage funnel – it would be the largest floating structure ever deployed.
Last week, he set up a crowd-funding page to raise 2,000,000 euros for a pilot project. As of today, he’s still about 1.8 million euros short. But he has time. Boyan Slat is only 19 years old.

You can find out more at theoceancleanup.com.