High-five, Boyan Slat. Way to see a project through. No more diapers in our hair! Photo: The Ocean Cleanup
We, as humans, have done a supremely good job of fucking up pretty much everything we touch. The ocean, in all its vastness, is one of the worst affected by our filth. We’re disgusting viruses; a plague on our home. But we mean well! Some of us do, anyway. Boyan Slat, who I’m sure you’ve heard of, is one of those people that means well. And according to a press release from Boyan’s company, The Ocean Cleanup, starting next year, a plan he’s been working on for the last four years will finally happen.
If you haven’t heard of Boyan, back in 2013, when he was just 19, he developed a plan to clean up the world’s oceans. And it wasn’t just a dream that he doodled in a notebook–it was a bonafide plan. When I was 19, I was on “waste-removal crew” in northern British Columbia. I burned paint cans and tires all night for a pipeline company in northern British Columbia and got drunk off the proceeds. Ah, the innocence of youth. Ha ha! I’m getting cancer and destroying the planet! Sigh.
Boyan, in all his ambitious teenaged glory, claimed that his plan could remove more than 7 million tons of plastic from the ocean in a measly five years. How gross is it that there is even 7 million tons of plastic to be cleaned out of the ocean? A plague, we are!
Slat’s project is surprisingly simple: it’s a network of floating booms anchored together, all floating around in the ocean’s currents and acting like a massive funnel (at 19, I would’ve called it a giant beer-bong, but Boyan wasn’t a normal 19-year-old). The plastic the booms collect would end up on massive platforms, where it would be separated from non-plastic things, like plankton and tiny little fish that are probably super cute. By using booms instead of nets, most of those tiny little fish won’t even end up flopping around on the platforms making everyone sad, anyway.
“The array is projected to be deployed in Q2 2016,” the press release stated. “The feasibility of deployment, off the coast of Tsushima, an island located in the waters between Japan and South-Korea is currently being researched. The system will span 2000 meters (that’s around 6500 feet, for you American folks), thereby becoming the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean.”
After the booms have been floating around cleaning up our water bottles, diapers, and totally-necessary drinking straws, Tsushima Island will have a look to see if the garbage can be used for anything–preferably not for more water bottles, diapers, and drinking straws. “It will be operational for at least two years,” the press release continued, “catching plastic pollution before it reaches the shores of the proposed deployment location of Tsushima island. Tsushima island is evaluating whether the plastic can be used as an alternative energy source.”
Then, depending on the success of the project, within five years and after a series of increasingly gigantic oceanic garbage trucks, The Ocean Cleanup is planning on deploying their coup de grâce: a 100km-long system to clean up about half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California.
Like I said before, on the whole, humans are disgusting. Rapists! Murderers! But people like Boyan Slat might change that. If only there were more of him, right?
