Super Nerd to Clean Up the Pacific

As you probably know, there’s a mass of plastic filth the size of Texas currently inhabiting the Pacific Ocean. It’s been on the eco-radar since 1997, and now there’s a self-anointed ‘super nerd’ who thinks that he has the nouse to get rid of it!

The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ covers a distance of almost 700,000 square metres, and spends its time floating between Eastern Japan and the stretch of Ocean North of the Hawaiian Islands. It’s reached such a size that it can be seen from space.

The guy that found the almighty ocean dump in 1997, racing boat captain Charles Moore, said that the atrocity would “bankrupt any country to clean up.”

The garbage removal project’s simply called ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ and the ‘super nerd’ at the helm is 21-year-old former Guinness world record holder (most high-pressured rockets simultaneously launched) Boyan Slat.

The Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO, Boyan Slat wearing jeans made from recycled ocean plastic.

The Ocean Cleanup is set to cost around 20 million sterling (around half of which has already been crowdfunded) and it’s currently in the testing stage. The theory is straightforward (a 100km long boom to scoop it all up), but the logistics are predictably problematic.

Once up and running, The Ocean Cleanup intends to fund itself with a retail line consisting of recycled plastic clothing, it is a gen Y initiative after all.

The project is gaining momentum after a successful, scaled-down test run in the Netherlands last week, and is set for release in 2020. Although it’s still a long way from solving the Pacific problem, the fact that a young guy is abandoning apathy to have a go is, at the very least, reassuring. The Ocean Cleanup is something truly worth supporting; there’s larger problems floating in the ocean than sharks.

Read more here.