People say a lot that one person can’t make a difference so why bother. One 20 year old has ignored any doubters or naysayers and launched a campaign to clean the worlds oceans. There is an estimated 5 trillion pieces of trash floating in the worlds oceans and there has never been an effort to any reasonable scale that may have an impact. Boyan Slat, the 20 year old CEO of The Ocean Cleanup has launched the worlds largest campaign to begin the ocean cleanup.

Slat’s system is designed to passively extract the tonnes of plastic from the ocean, stretching a mile long it is also set to be the largest floating structure in the ocean. It is estimated that the Ocean Array could extract 7,250,000 tonnes of plastic in it’s lifetime. Once the floating barrier catches the drifting garbage it is extracted using a conveyor belt in a way that is cheaper and faster than any other method previously conceived.

Over at The Ocean Cleanup they just reported on the 6th of July that an expedition to the North Atlantic ‘Garbage Patch’ went very successfully and they are hoping to return to the island of Azores on the 13th of July with their first samples of plastic that they have collected.

They are currently hoping to have the entire operation ready to launch in the second quarter of 2016 and going by their track record to date they are well on their way to doing that. We will post updates as the mission progresses.