Ocean Cleanup system heading to the Pacific
Dutch dropout’s dream becoming a reality
SAN FRANCISCO – As the sun rose Sunday morning, an Ocean Pacific cleanup system was slowly but steadily being towed out to its eventual, audacious goal of ridding the world’s oceans of plastic pollution.
Five years in the making, the Ocean Cleanup is the brainchild of a young Dutchman named Boyan Slat. He saw plastic trash polluting the waters in Greece when he was diving there in high school and he became obsessed with cleaning it up.
A vague idea became a plan, then a project that became a TED talk that found crowd-funded seed money. On Saturday the now 24-year-old got to stand at the bow and see the fruits of his idea towed out into the Pacific.
“There were lots of hurdles, lots of zigzags,” he said in an interview with USA TODAY.
Though the idea of a 19-year-old college dropout coming up with a viable plan to clean the world’s oceans might seem absurd, the project’s chief operating officer, Lonneke Holierhoek, views it differently.
“It wasn’t a crazy idea – it was an ambitious idea. It was a simple and elegant idea. Generally, the best ideas are. And it attracted people who wanted to provide knowledge, support and funds,” she said.
The team is based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. But the prototype was built in San Francisco Bay in part because it’s close to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The Ocean Cleanup is a passive system that consists of a 2,000-foot floating boom made up of plastic piping 4 feet in diameter.
Below the booms, a 9-foot skirt will corral the plastic trash.
For Slat, the years of work are the best way to deal with environmental issues that might seem daunting.
Rather than protesting the things we don’t agree with, we should build toward a future we do agree with, he said.
“I hope the Ocean Cleanup can be an inspiration for other people to just get going. If you don’t like something, try to fix it.”