““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.
Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.
Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.
The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.
GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.
It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…
Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21
How much you wanna bet the State of California will “prohibit” use of this system, because “reasons.”
If it’s in international waters they can’t do anything about it. And I’m pretty sure the federal government decides what can and can’t go on off our coasts too, not local or state.
Slat has been working on this since he was literally a child. I remember the first posts, articles, and I think there was even a fundraising campaign at one point.
I am so, so proud of him holy shit.
^^^ me too!! I remember the first news yeaaars ago that some kid had thought up a brilliantly simple method of cleaning up the oceans, and even that first prototype was amazingly efficient in solving a problem that the grownup world seemed to have given up on. It was so simple I couldn’t believe no scientist or engineer had thought of it before.
And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!
Well done, sir, well done and thank you <3
My big memory of this is that every time he sent out a prototype, people would overwhelmingly go “AH HA! See? It didn’t work as advertised because a storm broke it/it didn’t filter as much as he predicted/etc.”
And every time, Boyan would analyse what went wrong, tinker with it, and send a stronger version back out.
There are still issues with it, like, but this guy isn’t some shitty billionaire - he’s a normal man walking the walk to clean up an international problem that everyone else is just wringing their hands over. I have no clue why everyone is desperately waiting for him to fail. He’s picked his hill, and he plods along, and if the latest design hasn’t met expectations, he creates a new one.
Their website is here, btw, in case anyone wants to have a look; they still accept donations
