When he was 16,

, a boy from the Netherlands, went diving in the sea off Greece. What he saw changed him forever. “There was more plastic than fish,” Slat recalled. He is now 24. For eight years, he has been trying to figure out how to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. That’s a mess made up of nearly 5 trillion pieces of plastic, floating under the surface, slowly killing marine life, and causing an annual financial loss of $13 billion, the UN estimates. On September 8, Slat will start his dream project of ridding the ocean of plastic. Here’s how…

THE MISSION

In 2013, when Slat was 18, he launched

, a non-profit based in his hometown

. It is developing advanced tech to eliminate ocean plastic

THE MONSTER

Ocean Cleanup’s maiden cleaning venture is directed at the

, a zone lying between Hawaii and California, where plastic waste has accumulated. This zone covers an estimated surface area of 1.6 million sq km, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France

The approximate mass of plastic in the Patch is

80k tonnes

, equivalent to the weight of 500 jumbo jets

1.8 trillion

- That is the total number of plastic pieces estimated to be floating in the Patch, that is equivalent to 250 pieces of debris for every human in the world

The GPGP is the largest of five such gyres across the world’s oceans where ocean currents concentrate plastic waste. A gyre is a circular pattern of currents in an ocean basin

Slat and Co. say that a full-scale rollout could clean 50% of the Patch in just five years

The Ocean Cleanup claims it’ll be able to remove 90% of ocean plastic by 2040 after fleets of systems are deployed into every

combined with checking

THE METHOD

Slat and team have devised a means of using ocean currents to their advantage

Their ‘passive drifting system’ (the fi rst one is called System 001) consists of a 600-metre-long floater at the surface of the water with a tapered 3-metre-deep skirt attached below

The floater prevents plastic from flowing over it, while the skirt stops debris from escaping underneath

As the system moves through the water, the plastic continues to collect within the boundaries of the system as it takes a U-shape

Once the drifting system has rounded up the garbage, a ship can be used to gather it and take it away for processing

The Ocean Cleanup proposes to turn the mix of dirty, sometimes smelly, plastic into material that can be used for new products

Source: The Ocean Cleanup