In May, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Boyan Slat unveiled a contraption that he believed would rid the oceans of plastic. In a former factory in Utrecht, a crowd of twelve hundred people stood before a raised stage. The setting was futuristic and hip. A round screen set in the stage floor displayed 3-D images of Earth; behind Slat, another screen charted the rapid accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean since the nineteen-fifties. Slat is pale and slight, and has long brown hair that resembles Patti Smith’s in the “Horses” era. He was dressed in a gray blazer, a black button-down, black slacks, and skateboarding sneakers, which he wears every day, although he doesn’t skateboard. Onstage, he presented plastic artifacts that he had collected from the Pacific during a research expedition: the back panel of a Gameboy from 1995, a hard hat from 1989, a bottle crate from 1977. “This thing is forty years old,” he said in Dutch-inflected English. “1977 was the year that Elvis Presley left the building for good, presumably.” The audience laughed. Slat then held up a clear plastic dish, filled with shards of plastic. “The contents of this dish are the actual stomach contents of a single sea turtle that was found dead in Uruguay last year,” he said. A picture of the dead turtle flashed on a screen behind him.

Then Slat made his pitch. In the next twelve months, he and a staff of engineers at the Ocean Cleanup, an organization he founded in 2013, would build the system they had designed, assemble it in a yard on San Francisco Bay, then set sail with it, travelling under the Golden Gate Bridge and out into the Pacific. Slat’s destination was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, midway between California and Hawaii, an area within what is known as the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. The patch is not, as is often believed, a solid island of trash but a gyre, twice the size of Texas, where winds and currents draw diffuse floating debris onto a vast carrousel that never stops.

There are four other ocean gyres in the world, but scientists believe that the one in the North Pacific contains the most trash—nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing nearly eighty thousand metric tons, according to a study that scientists working with the Ocean Cleanup published in the online journal Scientific Reports last March. The study found that ninety-two per cent of the pieces are large fragments and objects: toothbrushes, bottles, umbrella handles, toy guns, jerricans, laundry baskets. Most problematic, and accounting for half of the plastic mass in the gyre, are what sailors call ghost nets: great tangles of mile-long discarded fishing nets weighing as much as two tons, which can ensnare animals such as seals and sea turtles. Attempting to fish out this drifting morass of trash using conventional methods—vessels, more nets—would be a Sisyphean task.

Slat became famous for a TEDx talk that he gave in 2012, in which he expounded on an idea that he had after a scuba-diving trip in Greece during high school. Instead of trying to catch ocean plastic, he thought, perhaps we could let the plastic come to us. “The oceanic currents moving around is not an obstacle—it’s a solution,” he told the audience. Slat, eighteen years old at the time, had entered an aerospace-engineering program at the Delft University of Technology and then, in keeping with the Silicon Valley archetype, dropped out before his second semester. But he had a big, vivid idea, a sweetly tremulous voice, and a goofy sense of humor. (His Twitter bio reads, “Studied aerospace engineering, becomes a cleaner.”) The video went viral, and Slat soon crowdfunded two million dollars from donors in a hundred and sixty countries. The United Nations Environment Programme named him a 2014 Champion of the Earth, noting his “keen mind” and “the lack of fear that marks out visionaries.” The jury for the world’s largest prize for design, the Danish INDEX: Award, granted him a hundred thousand euros, stating that his “incredibly ingenious idea will greatly improve the condition of the Earth’s greatest natural resource, as well as the lives of millions.” To date, Slat has hired eighty employees and raised some forty million dollars from donors online, charitable foundations, the Dutch government, a few anonymous Europeans, and Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff. After many iterations and scale-model tests of his invention, he and his team settled on a design.

The mechanism that Slat revealed in Utrecht was surprisingly simple: a two-thousand-foot floating plastic boom, attached to a geotextile skirt that would extend about ten feet beneath the ocean’s surface. The boom and the skirt would together create an artificial coastline that would accumulate flotsam riding the gyre’s currents, eventually forming a sort of shoreline of concentrated trash. Onstage, Slat gave a signal, and a black curtain behind him fell from the ceiling to reveal four monumental anchors. These were, Slat said, key to the concept. They would hang hundreds of metres deep, where the currents are much slower than at the top, insuring that the system moved more slowly than the trash, rather than just drifting around with it.

At regular intervals, Slat explained, a ship would transport the trash back to land, where it would be recycled. Some of it would be turned into plastic products (sunglasses, phone cases, chairs), which the Ocean Cleanup could sell to generate revenue for more systems. He expressed the hope that, by 2020, there would be sixty devices in the gyre; in five years, he said, they would have removed half of its trash. By 2040, Slat promised, he could clear ninety per cent of the trash from the North Pacific gyre.

The Monday after the announcement, Slat arrived at the Ocean Cleanup’s headquarters, an airy, modernist office in Delft. He was in high spirits. “We were at peak enthusiasm,” he told me later. Online donations were rising, and his in-box was full of congratulatory notes. His first meeting of the day was with his top engineers. They did not look cheerful. The lead engineer said that they had been running some new tests. They had not properly accounted for the power of “wave drift force”—the accelerating energy of the surface waves absorbed by the device—which would cancel out the drag of the anchors. The design would not work. Slat recalls the engineer saying, “We’re going to have to do it slightly differently.” There were some possible solutions, the engineer said. How about losing the anchors, allowing the device to race after the trash? Slat grew very quiet. “It was a bit stressful,” he said. “Like, whoops.”

In 1941, two British chemists, V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens, published an article in Science Digest that imagined “a dweller in the ‘Plastic Age.’ ” This Plastic Man, they wrote, “will come into a world of color and bright shining surfaces, where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbor dirt or germs.” As the chemists had predicted with surprising accuracy, “tough, safe, clean” plastic was soon everywhere. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, fifteen million tons of plastic were being produced every year. By 2015, the annual total was nearly thirty times greater.

“I would imagine he’s on his way to stomp things in the big city.” Facebook

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Of all the plastic waste ever created, only about nine per cent has been recycled. Seventy-nine per cent rests, forgotten, in landfills, dumps, forests, rivers, and the ocean. In recent years, less than fifteen per cent of the plastic packaging produced annually has been recycled—the sort of figure that has led Jane Muncke, the director of Zurich’s Food Packaging Forum, to describe recycling as “the fig leaf of consumerism.” The scale of the problem has been difficult to communicate to the public. In the past, images of animals, like the one that Slat showed in Utrecht, have mostly made the biggest impact. In the eighties, photographs of birds and turtles stuck inside six-pack rings caused a public outcry, and eventually the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that ring carriers be biodegradable. In 2005, a picture of Shed Bird, a six-month-old Laysan albatross, whose sliced-open belly revealed a collection of lighters, bottle caps, and other plastic scraps, became an environmental icon, a symbol of our careless throwaway lives. More recently, viral photos and videos have elevated the cause: a dead sperm whale that washed ashore in Indonesia with thirteen pounds of plastic in its stomach, a sea turtle with a drinking straw wedged up its nostril.