Plastic Pollution. Photo: boyanslat.com
Experts recommend that you drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day. Sound advice. So long as it doesn’t involve plastic bottles. Plastic bottles terrorize the environment, and if you don’t believe it, then Google a picture of the United States’ very own “plastic beach” (also known as Kamilo Beach, Hawaii). Over the past four years, Hawaii Wildlife Fund has cleaned up over 200,000 pounds of marine debris. To give some perspective, on average, an empty plastic water bottle weighs about 0.03 pounds. Kamilo Beach is just one of many polluted beaches around the world, due to the five major oceanic gyres, which are rotating systems of ocean currents that accumulate millions of tons of plastic. And no one wants to swim in (or indirectly consume) plastic garbage patches, marine life included.
The bottled water industry would go broke if people did not want it; it is entirely demand driven. Therefore, in order to see results in the environment, the market (we) must adjust our demands. There have been some efforts to address this issue, such as Concord, Massachusett’s prohibition of the sale of plastic water bottles and the weight reduction of plastic bottles, but the biggest solution may result from the research and design of 19-year-old Boyan Slat.
Slat, an aerospace engineering student at Delft University of Technology, has created an ocean cleanup device that could potentially remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans by 2020 – equivalent to the weight of 1,000 Eiffel Towers. The device would move across the plastic gyres, acting as a giant funnel with processing platforms to separate plankton from
Slat’s Oceanic Cleanup Array. Photo: boyanslat.com
waste. Slat became fully aware of oceanic pollution while diving in Greece.
“I came across more plastic bags than fish,” he stated at TEDxDelft 2012, where he unveiled his project. Alongside the work of his cleanup array, Slat established the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit responsible for the development of his proposed technologies. He hopes to raise $80,000 to complete his feasibility study, since many scientists and ocean activists have questioned the practicality of his solution. To address the critics, Slat’s project website states:
“We are currently only at about 1/4th of completing our feasibility study….Although the preliminary results look promising, and our team of about 50 engineers, modellers, external experts and students is making good progress, we had and have no intention of presenting a concept as a feasible solution while still being in investigative phase.”
The world has five years before they see the magic of Slat’s device, so in that time the public must recognize their responsibility to recycle, a simple act that can save countless aquatic animals, reduce pollutants from building up in the food chain, and save millions of dollars in clean-up costs, lost tourism, and damage to marine vessels.
“We created this mess,” said Slat in his TEDxDelft presentation. “We even invented this new material first before we made this mess, so please don’t tell me we can’t clean this up together.”
