Transcriber: Ondrej Moravcik Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
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 300,000,000 tons of plastic
and fraction of that enters rivers, water ways and eventually the oceans.
If you 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 won't talk 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 [is] 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 effect 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.
Get all the plastic out and simultaneously remove tons and tons
of persistent organic pollutants from the marine environment.
But how would we minimize environmental, financial and transportation cost then?
Let's use our enemy to our advantage, OK?
The oceanic currents moving around is not an obstacle -- it's a solution.
Why move through the oceans if the oceans can move through you?
By fixing the "ships" to the seabed and letting the rotating currents
do their work -- vast amounts of funds, manpower and emissions will be saved.
The platforms will, of course, be completely self-supportive
receiving their energy from sun, currents and waves.
And inspired by my diving at the Azores, It now actually seems
that the best shape for these platforms is that of a Manta Ray,
by letting its wings sway like a real manta,
we can assure contact of the inlet with the surface
even in the roughest weather.
Well, imagine a zigzag array of just 24 of these platforms cleaning an entire ocean.
Let's make a comparison, OK?
These are the beaches of Hong Kong, earlier this year.
The largest plastic spill in history. And this is their source,
just 6 containers.
How much could we get out?
Over 55 of these containers per day.
Not only is plastic directly responsible for over a billion USD in vessel damages a year,
no, the awesome surprise for me was that
if we sell the plastics retrieved from the 5 gyres we'd make over $500,000,000
and this is in fact more than the plan would cost to execute.
In other words -- it's profitable.
But I believe that the key thing is that
only if we realize change is more important than money, money will come.
And yes, it will be one of the largest environmental rescue operations yet, but we created this mess.
Heck, we even invented this new material first before we made this mess,
so please don't tell me we can't clean this up together.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)