Where is boyan slat from

The great Pacific garbage patch, for instance, is constantly shifting , the plastic litters the water column from top to bottom, and most of the pieces are minute. Together, that makes cleaning it up expensive — particularly as manufacturers keep making more plastic, and we keep throwing it away. He founded The Ocean Cleanup in as a nonprofit foundation. Long term, The Ocean Cleanup wants to launch 60 of these floating plastic tubes to trap marine plastics.

The Ocean Cleanup plans to fix the broken part and try to address the washout. Outside experts are bummed, too. But Kim Martini , senior oceanographer at Seabird Scientific, a company that develops ocean sensors and instrumentation, and Miriam Goldstein , a marine biologist and director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, saw challenges ahead.

Joost Dubois, a spokesperson for The Ocean Cleanup, says the team has taken these critiques into account. Expectations were high, however, since The Ocean Cleanup and Boyan Slat have been media darlings for years. Time m agazine named the trash collector one of the best inventions of Even if The Ocean Cleanup had been an immediate success, it was never going to be the only solution to plastic pollution.

And in an email to The Verge , Slat agreed. The other potential fixes to the rising scourge of plastic in our oceans that take aim further upstream tend to get less fanfare. Journalist Laurel Hamers rounded up a few of those upstream fixes for Science News.

And this week, Slat plans to unveil progress on the first prototype of his invention to reporters in Alameda, California, showing off the ungainly, 2,foot-long floating screen that is scheduled to be towed into the ocean before Labor Day. Its target? The Ocean Cleanup seemed big, brazen and bound to struggle when it was introduced in to Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who was chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

That is why I am convinced they are going to have some success. He would solve the problem. He was 18 years old. Now, six weeks shy of his 24th birthday, Slat still thinks he has the answer. And he has been persuasive enough to win praise from kings and prime ministers, rock stars and the United Nations. He also has drawn a cadre of persistent critics, who say his plan is directed at the wrong end of the plastics life cycle and could harm the very sea life it is meant to protect.

Slat rejects the notion that the amount of trash is already too immense, and too widely dispersed, to capture. And we will do this. The TED video drew more than 2 million views. In its immediate aftermath, Slat got thousands of emails urging him on. The trajectory that seems so outlandish to strangers is slightly less so to those who have known Slat from childhood. His father was a Croatian artist and his mother, who raised him, a Dutch-British consultant for foreigners relocating to Holland.

In his early teens he tried to remove moisture from ammonium nitrate, using the family stove. He triggered an explosion and a caustic fog. At 14, he knew enough about water-propelled rockets to launch his own and enough about organizing to rally people to a mass firing of the devices from a soccer field. At 16, Slat was on a family vacation to the Greek island of Lefkas when a scuba diving excursion delivered an unwelcome surprise.

The question became a school science project, which launched a mission. His organization, The Ocean Cleanup, has successfully started to clean the pollution that has been circling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Interceptor at work in Klang, Malaysia.

Was amazing to see it in reality! More Videos This autonomous and solar-powered system is cleaning rivers But millions more tons of plastic enter the oceans every year, almost all of it flowing from rivers. The Ocean Cleanup is deploying floating trash collectors called "Interceptors. Read More.