BOYAN SLAT: My name is Boyan Slat,
and I'm the founder and CEO at the Ocean Cleanup, where we've
developed the world's first technology to rid
the world's oceans of plastic.
Right now, millions of tons of plastic
have entered the oceans.
And they concentrate in these five massive areas
called ocean garbage patches.
The largest one is between Hawaii and California,
called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
In the past, people proposed to clean it up with boats and nets
to sort of go fishing for plastic.
But this would take many tens of thousands of years,
it would cost many billions of dollars to do that.
And one day, I realized that the ocean
currents, actually they rotate.
The plastic doesn't stay in one spot.
So I thought, well, maybe instead
of going after the plastic, why don't we
let the plastic come to us?
Why don't we use the natural ocean
currents in our advantage?
Then we came up with this passive system that
is comprised out of these very long
floating barriers, which then allows the ocean
to basically clean itself.
So we just stay there, the current
brings the plastic towards us.
And that way we can first concentrate
the plastic before we take it out and ship
it to land for recycling.
And we then calculated that with one such system deployed for 10
years, we can clean up about half
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
It's very hard to deny that this is a problem.
You can just literally go to a beach or take out a boat
and see it with your own eyes.
It's so physical.
Really no one can deny that this is something that we
need to do something about.
I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur.
I just enjoyed making things.
It's really just about the feeling
that you get when you have an idea in your mind
and then seeing that become reality.
I think there's really no better feeling in the world than that.
I've been sort of this inventor all my life,
but I didn't really have a real problem to work on.
And that changed when I was 16 years old
and I was diving in Greece.
And I realized, I came across more plastic bags than fish.
And I thought, well, why can't we just keep this up?
And I think that was the one question
that kickstarted it all.
I would describe myself as someone
who is quite obsessive when I have an idea,
and I just continue thinking about it.
I think it took about a year just playing around
with different concepts in my mind
until I had something that I thought could work.
And then of course, it went out of my head and onto paper.
And then to get started, of course I
think that was just the hardest part,
finding the resources to be able to actually get going.
But thankfully when [inaudible] internet
was being shared millions of times,
which then allowed me to build the initial team,
as well as raise the initial capital
through crowdfunding to actually start and make this dream
a reality.
I'm 100% sure that we can do this.
If I would have thought that success wasn't
one of the possible outcomes, I probably
wouldn't have started it.
I'm sure it's challenging, and I'm sure we'll encounter a lot
more surprises and problems.
But that's how innovation works.
It's just a continuous list of problems to be solved.
And eventually you will hopefully
solve that one last problem and then you've succeeded.