[light music]
♪ ♪
- It's an unforgettable experience
to spend time with people who simply refuse to give up,
building on ancient wisdom to look beyond our modern moment
to a future worth fighting for.
These are the stories we need right now.
It's so easy to see what's wrong
and even easier to lose hope altogether.
But the creativity comes in finding new ways
to do something about it.
I'm in Rotterdam to meet Boyan Slat,
who's doing this very thing, inventing a technology
designed to give our oceans a second chance.
Tell me how you got started.
- I was 16 years old. I went scuba diving in Greece.
And I was hoping to see all these beautiful things.
Then I looked around me, and I just saw a garbage dump.
I just saw more plastic bags than fish.
And I was so dismayed and shocked by that
that I asked myself a simple question.
Why can't we just clean this up?
♪ ♪
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is
the largest accumulation of trash in the world's oceans.
It's an area halfway between Hawaii and California.
It spans twice the size of Texas,
and it contains about 250 million pounds of trash.
Plastic is one of the largest threats our oceans face today.
There's now 700 species
known to be directly impacted by plastic pollution.
A few hundred of those
are actually threatened with extinction.
The most uncertain factor but perhaps
even the most impactful factor
is the health impact to us humans.
Plastic breaks down into smaller, smaller pieces.
They transport toxic chemicals into the food chain,
and that's a food chain that includes
more than three billion people that rely on fish
as their key source of protein.
♪ ♪
- Boyan and his team are working towards a goal
to clean up 90% of floating plastic pollution.
And here's the most powerful part.
It took several attempts before they created something
that even had a chance to achieve that.
It was touch and go.
People said the system he was inventing would never work.
But then it did.
[wondrous music]
- So the system itself
is a long, U-shaped floating barrier
that we drag forth very slowly
just to make sure that the fish can escape in time.
It acts like a funnel,
plus it goes towards the center
where we have what we call the retention zone,
which is a collection bag.
Every few days when it's full, we take the bag onto a ship.
We empty it, sort the waste.
And then ultimately, we bring it back to land for recycling.
♪ ♪
Actually, the oldest object we ever collected.
And you can see how it's being degraded.
- Yeah.
- So these flakes are coming off.
The thing is because of UV light,
because of the sun, the plastic becomes more brittle.
So then layer by layer, like an onion, it kind of peels.
- So this eventually can end up in the fish that we eat.
- Yeah.
And this can turn into millions of pieces of microplastics.
- Yeah.
- So in here, what you see is the,
essentially, the recycling process in steps.
So actually half of what we get out of
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets.
- Mm-hmm. - So it looks just like this.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I would say probably the most harmful type
because this, of course, ensnares a lot of wildlife.
So what we then do is we wash it,
and we shred it to get to this kind of pulp.
- Yep.
- And then ultimately, we injection-mold it,
we compound it, so we add some additives
to make sure that the materials is safe and high quality.
And then it becomes this.
So these are what you call pellets.
And these are the building blocks for any new object.
So you can just mold this into something new,
and the idea is that we are producing durable,
sustainable products out of this,
and with that, help fund the cleanup.
Actually, as a proof of concept,
we made these sort of high-end designer sunglasses.
- Wow.
- So this is 100% made from
the plastic we took out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
They look good on you. - These are great.
So if the Garbage Patch is cleaned up in 10 to 15 years,
what's to prevent another one 20 years from now forming?
- Realistically, the amount of plastic that's being produced
is not going down.
In fact, the projections are that by 2060,
the amount of plastic produced will increase threefold.
So really what we need to do is
we need to decouple the plastic usage
from the plastic flows into the ocean.
♪ ♪
We have interceptors now in 11 rivers,
some of the most polluting rivers in the world.
And we believe we can really stop most of
the world's plastic emissions from leaking into the ocean.
- What do you think when people say
what you're doing is impossible?
- I think when somebody says something is impossible,
I think the sheer absoluteness of that the statement
should make you suspicious of it.
If you look at history,
everything that we now take for granted
used to be impossible at some point in time.
So if you're an entrepreneur,
if you're trying to make something,
if you're trying to create something, yes,
I think it's very important to listen
and to listen to people's advice.
But if there's one bit of advice
that you should really ignore,
it's people who say that something can't be done.
♪ ♪
- The challenges facing Boyan and us all are daunting.
Intertidal times are full of danger,
but it's also where all the creative juice is.
And for those of us who want to push the envelope
on who we are and what's possible
on this planet looking forward,
this is our moment.