At only 18, he thought of a system to clean up the oceans. Today, the whole world has its eyes on him and his great project, 'The Ocean Cleanup'.
This is the life of Boyan Slat.
With ChangeNOW Summit
This is the life of Boyan Slat.
With ChangeNOW Summit
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00:00Our mission is to rid the world's oceans of plastic, and to do that we really need to do two things.
00:05We need to prevent more plastic from reaching the oceans, but we also need to clean up what's already in the oceans.
00:13I was 16 years old, I went scuba diving in Greece, just for a family holiday, and I looked around me and I just saw more plastic bags than fish, and I wondered, why can't we just clean this up?
00:43At that moment, the question that kept me thinking, couldn't stop thinking about it, and then after half a year of aerospace engineering in university,
01:12I decided to drop out and start the ocean cleanup.
01:32It's not that people don't want the ocean to be cleaned, it's just that we don't have the tools yet to do it.
01:43Good luck!
01:44So the way we propose to clean it up is to have passive cleanup systems that float around in the ocean.
01:49These things are like artificial coastlines that go around, concentrate the plastic, and then every few months you come by, take the plastic out, and bring it to land for recycling.
02:01So one year ago was a really dark period for the ocean cleanup, for the team, because the first system that we launched to the oceans actually broke in two, we were forced back to land, and actually had to completely redesign the system.
02:31What if we could intercept plastic in rivers before it reaches the ocean?
03:011,000 rivers are responsible for roughly 80% of the world's plastic pollution.
03:10That's 1% of rivers doing 80% of the damage.
03:17What we need is a product, one integrated system that you can bring anywhere in the world, install within days, and that just works.
03:26That's the missing piece.
03:29That's what we need to close the tap, and it doesn't exist.
03:36Until today.
03:40We developed what we call the Interceptor, which we launched last year.
03:51We now are working in rivers in Malaysia and Indonesia to catch the plastic before it reaches the oceans.
04:09The Interceptor is a new way of collecting plastic from the oceans.
04:14The Interceptor is a new way of collecting plastic from the oceans.
04:20The Interceptor is a new way of collecting plastic from the oceans.
04:27I think transitioning the world from being non-sustainable to being sustainable is the biggest challenge of our generation.
04:36The Interceptor