20-Year-Old Engineer's Idea To Make Ocean Clean Itself Will Be Launched Next Year

Boyan Slat is a 20 year old with an idea on how to clean plastic trash from our oceans. The Ocean Cleanup initiative wants to reduce the amount of trash in the oceans by employing floating barriers that are moored to the seabed. They would collect lighter-than-water plastic trash with the help of the ocean currents and without harming sea life.

The pilot, which will be deployed near Tsushima Island (located between Japan and Korea) in the first quarter of 2016, will test the durability and viability of the project. It will be only 2000 meters long, a far cry from the planned 100 kilometers length, but it will still be the longest floating structure on Earth.

Cleaning up plastic garbage in ocean, like the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is impractical with ships. However, the 100km stationary cleanup array could remove 42% of the Garbage Patch over 10 years, 70,320,000kg in total.

More info: theoceancleanup.com | Facebook | Twitter (h/t: boredpanda)

When it’s deployed in 2016, the 2,000m floating line will become the longest floating structure in the world.

This concept will test out 20-year-old Boyan Slat’s plan to rid the oceans of floating plastic waste.

This plan would use ocean currents to skim the plastic trash without harming the sea life.

The eventual Ocean Cleanup Array would be a 100km long and able to collect 70,320,000kg of plastic waste over 10 years

Estimated clean up cost would be roughly 4.53 euros (5.04 USD) per kilogram - 3% of the cost of other potential clean-up methods