Plastic is cheap, versatile and useful, and there is no denying that. But because plastic doesn’t degrade easily, it has become part and parcel of an environmental disaster.
Currently, the world produces around 300 million tons of plastics every year, and since the 1950s, we have produced about six billion metric tons of the stuff. Plastics are clogging our landfills, polluting the landscape and the oceans, choking our rivers and streams, and is even caught up in the Arctic ice. This man-made, versatile and cheap technology is also killing our wildlife.
The Ocean Cleanup
Slat’s concerns over plastics pollution in the world’s oceans prompted him to devise a plan to clean them up. It sounded like a pipe-dream to many when Slat first described his idea, but he felt it was so simple it just might work. Boyan Slat founded and is the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, a group with the express purpose of developing technologies to extract, prevent, and intercept plastic pollution.
The Ocean Cleanup has one primary goal, and that is to “fuel the world’s fight against oceanic plastic pollution, by initiating the largest cleanup in history,” according to their website.
Slat came up with what he calls a floating “Ocean Cleanup Array.” Instead of going after the plastics, which are in every one of the world’s oceans, he devised an array of long floating barriers to let the ocean currents concentrate the plastic itself. The system of floating barriers is over a mile long. The barriers trap any floating plastic debris, which is then picked up using a conveyor belt.
The system had its first proof-of-concept test, which was performed in the Azores Islands. After proving the feasibility of the array in doing what it was supposed to do, the real evaluation of the array will take place in the second quarter of 2016, in a two-year pilot project in real-world conditions off the coast of Tsushima, an island lying between Japan and South Korea.
This pilot project is worth watching to see if it works. And if it does work as expected, we have something even bigger to look forward to. The organization then plans to launch a “62-mile-long array that will be capable of capturing about half of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” over the course of about 10 years.
Boyan Slat first became interested in cleaning up the oceans while diving off the coast of Greece when he was 16-years-old. In 2012, he decided to make his intentions public, and now, we are at the threshold. Slat points out that more will have to be done. “Although a cleanup will have a profound effect, it is just part of the solution. We also need to close the tap, to prevent any more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.”
