This year was one of the years I shall never forget. The coronavirus pandemic shapes our lives day by day into a new reality, everything seems to change, from hygienic strict rules to working from home, or worse, to unemployment. Due to economical reasons, my job became not a necessity any longer. I must admit (still feeling a bit guilty about it), I do enjoy the unexpected free weeks, more time to read, more time to do online courses, more time for my endless ideas. Hunting for jobs and having interviews between two books and a few new ideas, I got to meet or got to know interesting new people and perspectives. Lately, I have applied for a position at The Ocean Clean-up. Not about the job itself I wanna write, but about the founder of this company and his vision. Before applying for a job I like to do some research about the company that is hiring, you know, just to have my homework done in case of being selected for an interview and to feed my always hungry curiosity as well. This is how I found out who Boyan Slat is. I confess I am impressed by this young man. I personally never met him, but he seems to be a guy who likes an endless challenge, always sharp. His story inspires and creates awareness. He would definitely sparkle your envision of life.
Boyan Slat is a Dutch-Croatian inventor and entrepreneur who develops advanced systems to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. It all started while he was scuba diving in Greece and was surprised to see more plastic than fish. Boyan came up with the idea to develop a passive concentration system. He envisioned to use the ocean currents to his advantage, and let them be the driving force behind catching and concentrating the plastic. Instead of going after the plastic, let the plastic come to you. At the age of 18, Boyan devised a concept that utilizes the natural oceanic forces to passively catch and concentrate ocean plastic, through which the theoretical cleanup time could be reduced from millennia to mere years.
In 2012, after graduating high-school, Boyan was invited to present his ideas at the TEDx conference. Initially, the video got not much attention until a year later when everything changed and his idea got viral. According to The Ocean Cleanup site, Boyan decided to quit his studies at Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft only 6 months after he had started the studies, and founded The Ocean Cleanup, with just 300 euros of savings as a starting capital.
After a year of feasibility studies completed by a voluntary team of close to 100 scientists and engineers, in June 2014, a 528-page study was published on. Furthermore, The Ocean Cleanup needed the money to initiate the engineering process as well as a series of expeditions. In only 100 days, with the support of over 38,000 funders from 160 countries, a total of 2,154,282 USD was raised, making it “the most successful non-profit crowdfunding campaign in history” at the time. Awesome, isn’t it!
Since 2015, The Ocean Cleanup started different ocean research expeditions, necessary to fully understand the plastic pollution problem. Sailing between Hawaii and California, the first expedition collected more data on oceanic plastic than had been collected in the past 40 years combined. The results of these expeditions were published in Scientific Reports in 2018: around 80 million kg of floating plastic debris of various sizes and shapes, principally made of Polyethylene and Polypropylene, accumulated in an area 3 times the size of continental France. In 2017, the first Ocean Cleanup Interceptor™ prototype was deployed and tested in Zuidland, South Holland, The Netherlands, followed by System 001, which has been the world’s first cleanup system to be trialed and utilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You can check here how the Ocean Cleanup system works, as well as discover which are the five ocean garbage patches that accumulate trash, the largest one being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California.
Boyan Slat was awarded in 2015, by the HM King Harald of Norway, the maritime industry’s Young Entrepreneur Award. In 2016, Forbes included him in their 30 under 30 edition. In 2017, Elsevier named him Dutchman of the Year, Reader’s Digest chose him as the European of the Year and he was given the Thor Heyerdahl Award for innovation in the maritime industry. In 2018, Boyan was named ‘European Entrepreneur of the Year’ by Euronews. Boyan Slat is in the ‘25 people that will shape the next 25 years’ in WIRED magazine. The Ocean Cleanup has been chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the Best Inventions of 2015. In 2019, the European Commission elected Boyan as one of the experts to advise the commission on its multi-billion-euro innovation strategy. Pretty impressive, huh?
In October 2020, The Ocean Cleanup launched the first product made with plastic removed from the ocean, using the catch from the System 001/B campaign in 2019: The Ocean Cleanup sunglasses. The product is meant to spread their mission, hoping that by making something that is often carried around, it can also help create awareness.
And all this great mission started with the idea of a young guy scuba diving in Greece! I think this is an inspiring story, an awakening of doing something no matter how little for saving the only home we have at the moment, The Earth.
Follow your dreams, guys!