At 16-years-old, Boyan Slat had a dream. What if we could begin removing the plastic debris that’s proliferated throughout the world’s oceans? That question quickly turned to action – Slat founded the Ocean Cleanup Project at 17 and has developed a technology he argues could be scaled to rid the ocean of plastic entirely.
Now, four years after the Project’s founding, Slat’s made his most ambitious announcement to date. The Ocean Cleanup Project plans to deploy a new and improved design in the Pacific Ocean in 2018 (two years ahead of schedule), and estimate they can remove half of the debris that comprises the Great Pacific Garbage patch in five years. The acceleration of the project is due in part, no doubt, to the $31 million the Project was able to raise over the last few years.
“The design improvement entails making the cleanup system mobile,” explains the Ocean Cleanup Project in an announcement. “Rather than fixing a system to the seabed at great depths, we will use sea anchors to ensure our systems move slower than the plastic. The cleanup will be carried out by a fleet of systems, rather than one massive system.”
If estimates prove true, the Ocean Cleanup Project’s announcement is big news, but critics in the scientific community are skeptical.
Jan van Franeker is a marine biologist at Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands. His research suggests that ingestion of plastic among seabirds in the North Sea decreased by 75% after reductions in industrial plastic entering the waterway.
“Focusing clean-up at those gyres, in the opinion of most of the scientific community, is a waste of effort,” he told Science Magazine. “It’s a lot of money to reduce something that disappears in 10 to 20 years, if you stop the input.”
Others have expressed concern about the technical viability of such an ambitious project, its impact on marine ecosystems, and the focus on floating debris when studies suggest 94% of plastic sinks to the ocean floor.
And still others say the act of cleaning up plastic pollution distracts from the larger societal dependence on single-use plastics endemic to the modern world.
According to Science Magazine, Slat claims it’s necessary to find solutions to both sides of the same coin. “We need to intercept plastic before it becomes ocean plastic. And we need to clean up what is out there,” he said.
