Could A Teenager Save Our Oceans?

Nearly 71% of the world’s surface is covered by ocean, and more than 97% of all of our planet’s water is contained in the ocean.

But our oceans are facing environmental catastrophe with plastic waste causing floating garbage tips of waste circulating through rotating currents around the world. 

But now, there could be a solution.

Danish teenager Boyan Slat has stunned the world with his simple, cost effective and potentially ocean-saving solution.

The Ocean Array Project is a uniquely designed series of floating booms and processing platforms designed to collect floating plastic rubbish. The Array uses the concept of ‘passive collection’ and would only be driven only by naturally occurring wind and currents. The ingenious part of the concept is that it is designed to only capture floating plastic - allowing fish and plankton to pass through unharmed. The plastic would then be collected ready for recycling – which Boyan believes could generate up to $500 million a year from recycling – more than covering the cost of building the Array.

So how did a 17 year old (Boyan is now 19) come up with this idea? While diving in Greece, Boyan was upset by the fact that he was seeing more plastic bags than he was fish. While still in high school, Slat decided to devote 6 months to understanding plastic pollution in the oceans and began studying the effects and the efforts that had already been made to clean it up.

He eventually came up with the passive cleaning concept and presented his findings to a TEDx conference in 2012. The Ocean Cleanup Array was awarded Best Technical Design at the Delft University of Technology and Boyan has been recognised as one of the 20 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs Worldwide. 

Last month, Boyan and the Ocean Clean Up team released at 530 page feasibility study which claimed that the concept is indeed a feasible method to clean almost half the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just 10 years. 

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au