Dear Mrs. Marquez, 

 

“It was always our intention to go to the source of the problem,” Slat reveals, “but the accumulated stock of ocean plastic was such a neglected area that it became the obvious first target. However, in 2015 we thought it was time to take a risk and start the second business line, even before the first was fully operational. 

“So, we began looking at prevention. We began looking at rivers.” 

The Ocean Cleanup initiated a study to map where plastic enters our oceans, discovering that around 80 percent of it originates from the world’s 1000 most polluting rivers (with individual outputs ranging between 0.8 and 2.7 million metric tons of waste per annum). The remaining 20 percent is deposited by a second tranche of 30,000 water ways. 

Slat says this finding hammered home the realization that his first ‘business line’ would be fighting a losing battle if he didn’t “turn off the tap” and stop the plastic at the source. 

“The rivers are the arteries feeding garbage into the ocean,” he stresses, “transporting waste from land to dump at sea. But if we can block those arteries, we bypass the problem. So, we needed a solution for those 1000 rivers.” 

And now he has one. One that Ocean Cleanup aims to deploy across all of those 1000 rivers by 2025. If they can get the support. 

Going with the flow 

Meet the Interceptor. As its name imparts, this solution intercepts river borne rubbish before it escapes to sea, using a ‘barrier’ that is optimized with the river’s natural current to guide waste to a moored collection unit. This is a 24m long, autonomous catamaran barge with a central conveyor belt to gobble up the garbage flow, feeding it into six dumpsters, with a combined capacity of 50m3. Powered by solar energy, charging a 20 kwh onboard battery, the system monitors the debris levels, automatically distributing it between the individual bins and using a 4G cloud link to communicate with a land-based support team, who then empty the unit as required. Working at optimal efficiency a single Interceptor can extract up to 100,000 kg of garbage from a river per day, with the conveyor belt capable of carrying 24 kg per second.  

Once there was a Stone Age, a Bronze Age and now we are in the middle of the Plastic Age. Because every year we produce about 300 million tons of plastic and a fraction of that enters rivers, waterways and eventually the oceans. 

If we want to eat a biscuit nowadays, we have to buy a biscuit within a plastic wrapper, within a plastic tray, within a cardboard box, within a plastic foil, within a plastic bag. It’s not hazardous nuclear waste — it’s a biscuit. 

And this is me. I love diving just taking you through my holiday slides here. This is at the pristine Azores Islands and this is how their beaches look. Covered with plastic fragments. 

Due to sun and waves over the years the garbage breaks down into ever smaller pieces, but remains plastic. And, well interestingly, you don’t see a lot of red particles in here because those look like food to birds more than any other color. So this is the result. 

And well, the debris primarily collects at these 5 rotating currents called the gyres, where it doesn’t only directly kills sea life, but due to the absorption of PCBs and DDTs, also poisons the food chain. A food chain that includes us — humans. 

And while diving in Greece I came across more plastic bags than fish and astounded by the depressing sights my Scottish dive buddy turned to me and said, “A lot of jellyfish is here, dear. Seen about a thousand.” There were no jellyfish. 

I went talking about environmental issues in general. I think the common response is, well that’s a long way off. That’s for our children to worry about. So hello, here I am. 

Why don’t we just clean it up? There are a multiple reasons why current plastic pollution researchers believe we should focus on prevention, for example through education, rather than attempting a cleanup operation. Because we would need to deal with 5 colossal areas — each moving around. Plastic sizes ranging from these massive ghost nets to molecules — bycatches and emissions. 

Furthermore we would need to get all the plastic back to land. It would need to be financially realistic and in fact the total amount of plastic within the gyres unknown. 

But about a year ago, when I was on my way to the hairdresser’s and I must admit I don’t go there often but I had this little epiphany. I saw even old people throwing rubbish in the water and I thought, well some people will just never learn, will they? We’ll need the combination of both roads and we’ll need them soon. 

So then I simply used this list of concerns as challenges, and in fact a week later as a school assignment, I had a chance to spend a lot of time on a subject of choice together with a friend of mine. And this gave me the perfect opportunity to do new and fundamental research regarding plastic pollution. 

I then went on a holiday to Greece taking this manta trawl with me, which is the common device for sampling plastic, and so I had to leave home all my clothes due to low cost airlines weight limit policies. 

Well, the trawl we built, however, is 15 times finer than the regular one. And what we discovered was that the count of those minute particles is in fact 40 times higher than the larger particles. So we have to take these small plastics out, but then we wouldn’t want to take the important plankton out as well. 

Luckily these could simply be separated using centrifugal forces. However, nobody knew how much G forces common zoo-plankton could survive. So we took the trawl out again, and we didn’t have a boat, so and we tested it, and in fact they can survive over 50 Gs, which is more than enough for successful separation. 

And then in order to know up to which depth the ocean surface should be cleaned, we designed and built something that I call the multilevel trawl. We basically stuck ten trawls on top of each other. 

Here you can see us testing that on the North Sea, I thought it was a great day — I was the only one who didn’t get sick but then the so perfectly working trawl broke and of course we didn’t quit there, because I believe you can’t clean up something you don’t know the size of. 

I’ve heard the estimations ranging from several hundred thousand tons all the way to a hundred million tons. I knew we really need a better estimate — some scientific data. 

So then I simply contacted some professors from the universities Delft, Utrecht and Hawaii — who then actually helped us in determining how much plastic there is in the top layers of the gyres. 

The result — a whopping 7.25 million tons of extractable plastic in 2020. That’s the weight of 1,000 Eiffel Towers floating in the gyres. 

Now, researcher and in fact, discoverer of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Charles Moore estimates it would take 79,000 years to remediate that. However, I believe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can completely clean itself in just 5 years. And that is a difference of 78,995 years. 

Well, of course, this is the conventional idea of extracting litter, so you have a vessel and a net fishing for plastic. Of course multiple vessels could be used to cover a larger area, but by spanning booms between those vessels, suddenly a much larger area would be covered, because the essence is not to catch the debris, but divert it. 

Because there is no mesh size, we can even get out the smallest particles, and since all organisms can simply move under the booms, we’ll be able to eliminate bycatches by 99.98%. 

But, if we want to do something different shouldn’t we also have to think differently? 

For example then: the absorption of PCBs by plastic is not such a bad thing, it’s a good thing. 

Also, he has not done this for fame, but for the better of the future generations. He has found solutions to many things and problems which no one have found in the past. And he has actually actioned these plans with his team which is even harder to find the motivation to do that.. 

Boyan Slat is an incredible figure who has inspired me to try and to more to stop plastic from polluting oceans and disrupting food chains, but not only this but start using more eco-friendly products. He has done so much to help the world and that has made many young people think that they might have a future in a world with a healthy environment, not only this but has helped the future generations think of new ways to take action. The reason this is the case is because of how he is presenting a non-biased view of pollution and many children are being taught something which is not the case. Most importantly, he persisted through the obstacles and never gave up. This is the relationship between Boyan Slat and my own life.  

 

So this is why I believe Boyan Slat is truly a notable person. 

 

Yours sincerely, 

Michael Hu