Every year, the world produces about 300 million tons of plastic, much of which will end up in rivers, waterways, and eventually, the oceans. For 19-year-old entrepreneur Boyan Slat, this plastic pandemic is a problem that needs to be addressed.
"We are in the middle of the plastic age," said Slat during a talk at TEDxDelft. "This rubbish in our water systems doesn't only directly kill sea life, but it breaks down and this poisons the food chain - a chain that includes us."
According to Slat, this debris collects at five major currents across the world's oceans, creating massive gyres of plastic. Charles Moore, the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean gyre in 1997, termed the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, estimated it would take 79 000 years to remove this mass of plastic from the oceans. But Slat has a different idea - one he believes will allow the ocean to clean itself in roughly five years.
He has developed a manta-ray-inspired platform with long floating booms that will sift plastics from the water. The devices will be fixed to the ocean floor and will be connected in a zigzag pattern. "The oceanic currents creating these gyres are not an obstacle, they are the solution. Let's use our enemy to our advantage," he said, adding that the manta-ray-shaped platforms are self-supported and will extract their energy from the sun and ocean currents.
For Slat, it was important to figure out the size of the problem first. "I believe you cannot clean up something you don't know the size of," he said, adding that he has heard estimations about the amount of plastic contained in the top layers of the gyres ranging from several hundred thousand tons to one hundred million tons.
After talking to professors from various institutions, they estimated there will be a massive 7.25 million tons of extractable plastic in the top layers of the gyres by 2020. "That is the weight of 1 000 Eiffel Towers," he said. Slat believes his technology will be able to tackle this.
He also noted that, should he sell the plastic retrieved from the five gyres around the world, the recyclable material would be worth over $500 million, more than the cost of the plan itself.
"This will be one of the largest environmental cleanup operations yet, but we created this mess," he concluded. "If you want to do something different, shouldn't we have to think a little differently?"
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