Boyan Slat, a 19-year-old Aerospace Engineering student at TU Delft designed a device that could clean the ocean from plastic trash.
The concept called Ocean Cleanup Array, combines long floating booms with processing platforms,which can collect and separate trash.
Plastics are one of the main ocean pollutants, adding tones of harmful chemicals every year and killing whole populations of aquatic animals. Governments and companies spend millions in order to compensate the loss in tourism, remediation costs and broken equipment.
This is where the Ocean Cleanup Array project comes in, providing an efficient way to clean up an entire gyre in no more than 5 years. By fitting a network of booms around garbage patches, the estimated plastic waste that could be removed from the oceans equals 7,250,000 tones.
The design is a result of a school paper by Slat on ocean remediation. His work was awarded the Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. Later in 2012, Boyan presented his already improved concept at TedXDelft 2012.
The concept is now taken up by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, which is currently looking for financial backing in order to finalize and materialize the research.
