The Ocean Cleanup - Boyan Slat. In 2011, together with friend Tan Nguyen, Boyan Slat embarked on writing his final paper in the last year of secondary education, researching the possibility of remediation world’s oceanic garbage patches. During this project, they performed analyses on concentration of particles between 90 micron and 333 micron, plastic/plankton separation, plastic depth measurement devices and amount of plastic within the top layer of the gyres. Spending over 500 hours on the paper (instead of the required 80 hours), it has won several final paper prizes, including Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. Boyan continued the development of his concept during the summer of 2012, and revealed it several months later at TEDxDelft 2012.
At iSea Clash of The Concepts, The Ocean Cleanup was awarded the second prize by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment. 19-Year-Old Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7,250,000 Tons Of Plastic From the World's Oceans. 19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans.
The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. Top 10 Participating Countries. Those Crazy Plastic Cleaning Machines. If I had a dime for each brilliant idea to “clean up the “Garbage Patch” that has been forwarded to me over the last few years I would be a millionaire.
These gyre cleanup machines, devices and foundations that emerge periodically are not going to happen. However they are likely to get lots of media attention –and distract from the real solutions. These more or less sophisticated delusions and fantasies of massive offshore cleanups testify to how misunderstood our plastic pollution problem is, and how disconnected we are from nature in general, and from our oceans in particular.