Smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This living mound of nastiness is an artificial island composed of trillions of pieces of discarded plastic, fishing equipment, and other miscellaneous things that probably shouldn’t be in the ocean. It’s been sitting there accumulating for about 60 years now, and one man has had quite enough.
24-year-old Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, along with his organization The Ocean Cleanup, is beginning a massive mission to systematically disassemble and recycle the entire thing. With just nets and lines though, this would take longer than human civilization has existed. Enter Slat’s secret weapon: an artificial coastline.
Inspired by the trash-gathering shorelines of Greece, Slat has developed a large pipeline with a skimmer underneath that will be placed in a U-shape in front of the Patch’s ocean current. Utilizing the current’s natural gravity, Slat’s team will collect the trash as it hits the pipeline and ferry it back to San Francisco for recycling. By Slat’s estimate, they’ll have cleaned up roughly half of the entire island with this method in about five years.
