A young Dutch engineering student has a plan to clean up the world's oceans. He says it can be done in just five years and, with the help of his foundation, produce a multi-million dollar profit from the effort that will leave fish and plankton unharmed, according to the Daily Mail.
The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," or "Pacific Trash Vortex," is a massive accumulation of garbage particles in the Pacific Ocean, an environmental hazard that is detrimental to marine wildlife, killing millions of animals each year and introducing harmful invasive species of algae and man-made pollutants to the oceans and thus, the world's food chains.
The issue has left scientists and researchers flabbergasted for years, but nineteen-year old Boyan Slat has come up with a potential solution.
Slat created the idea of a device with floating booms and processing platforms that is designed to move through the oceans, collecting plastic waste on the water's surface for later recycling, a self-sufficient device that saves energy by being tethered to the sea bed and running on solar and wave power.
Known as the Ocean Cleanup Array, the device would work by collecting waste through its platform where it is sucked in through a giant funnel, moving slow enough and with no mesh netting to allow for animals like fish and plankton time to escape.
Slat presented his idea along with alarming statistics about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch at a TEDxDelft conference last year. He claims that his device could earn more than $500 million in revenue via recycling while removing nearly 20 billion tons of plastic from the world's oceans.
"One of the problems with preventive work is that there isn't any imagery of these 'garbage patches', because the debris is dispersed over millions of square kilometers," Slat wrote on his website. "By placing our arrays however, it will accumulate along the booms, making it suddenly possible to actually visualize the oceanic garbage patches. We need to stress the importance of recycling, and reducing our consumption of plastic packaging."
Slat's idea for the project first came about in a paper he wrote for school, which caught the attention of marine experts after it had been published. His paper won him the Best Technical Design 2012 from the Delft University of Technology, among an array of other prizes, according to VR-Zone. Supported in part by his organization, The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, Slat's ocean cleanup array would operate on the power of the sun and the oceans, greatly reducing the risk of polluting the oceans any further.
Slat has now began raising money to develop his invention, which he calls "Marine Litter Extraction." Currently, he is seeking maritime structure engineers, physical oceanographers, hydrodynamic/fluid dynamics modellers and fellow engineering students to contribute their efforts to help make his vision a reality.
