SB_issue54_digital

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