AQUATIC
words: Amber O’Dell photos: theoceancleanup.com No doubt all of us are growing tired of walking along our beautiful beaches and spotting the occasional plastic bottle bobbing over the waves, beer can half-buried in the shore, or plastic bag being brought in with the sea foam. This garbage many of us have to pick up and move out of the way of our beach towels are some of the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. With our rubbish being incredibly damaging to marine life, it’s unfortunate that plastic is as common a sight as fish nowadays, in fact, scientists predict plastics will outweigh all fish species in our oceans by 2050. While this is a damning and upsetting issue, there are so many people doing truly incredible and innovative things to clean up our oceans that deserve to be spoken about. While large media companies would prefer to shine a light on controversial and environmental protesting, the people that truly deserve the world’s attention are those taking action and providing hope and inspiration for others to do the same. One of these incredible people is young Dutch inventor and entrepreneur, Boyan Slat. In 2011, Boyan was also tired of spotting rubbish on the beaches of his home, so, at the age of 16, when most of us were still figuring out how to socialise, he decided to do something about the world’s devastating ocean pollution. Driven by his shock in seeing more plastic than fish while scuba diving one day, Boyan said he came up with an idea for a strategic and energy-efficient solution to rid the world of large garbage patches floating in the middle of the ocean. “I wondered why we couldn’t just clean it up, and that rather simple question stuck in my head. “This plastic doesn’t go away by itself, and to just let hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic be out there fragmenting into these small and dangerous microplastics to me seems like an unacceptable scenario.” While cleaning up ocean garbage is easy when it washes up on our shore, it is not so much when it is stuck circling in currents thousands of kilometres away from land. So, Boyan’s solution was to create long barriers to concentrate the plastic and act as artificial coastlines where there is none. “I envisioned an extremely long network of floating barriers, they’re like curtains floating in the ocean which are attached to the seabed. So what happens is the current comes around and because it’s in a V-shape, the plastic gets pushed towards the centre. “I came up with the idea of a curtain, not a net, so there’s nothing sea life can get entangled with. The system would also move very slowly, around four inches per second on average. So the chances of sea life being harmed were very minimal.” At the age of 17, when most of us were having nightmares about public speaking, Boyan presented his idea in a TEDx talk in the city of Delft in the Netherlands. In 2013, his passion and determination led him to drop out of an aerospace engineering course at the Delft University of Technology. It was at this point that he founded the non-profit organisation The Ocean Cleanup, which currently has its HQ in Rotterdam. Boyan said it was a challenge being in the CEO role at the start of the organisation, but despite his many failed attempts at creating a working prototype, and his ironic problem of getting badly seasick, he eventually created System 001, the first ocean clean-up system, in September 2018. “When I started, there was this consensus that you could never clean this up, that the problem is way too big, the ocean is way too rough. There was the issue of bycatch - ‘plastic is too big, plastic is too small’. CARETAKER