Plastic pollution. In 2008, our global plastic consumption worldwide has been estimated at 260 million tons, and, according to a 2012 report by Global Industry Analysts, plastic consumption is to reach 297.5 million tons by 2015. Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature… Captions and Photograph: © SAF — Coastal Care
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Dutch wunderkind Boyan Slat turned 20 this year. He also closed on $2 million in crowdfunding to build cleanup contraptions designed to intercept and remove plastic refuse from the ocean.
The world’s oceans contain millions of tons of garbage, much of it plastic debris that collects in gyres that span hundreds of miles. Slat, an aeronautical engineer and founder of the Ocean Cleanup, has been contemplating how best to attack this problem since the age of 16…
LEARN MORE ABOUT: The Ocean Cleanup And Boyan Slat
Read Full Article, Business Week
19-Year-Old Is Ready to Build an Ocean Cleanup Machine, Bloomberg Business Week (06-17-2014)
Boyan Slat, a 19-year-old Dutch aeronautical engineering student, is raising $2 million to build an ocean cleanup contraption he designed to passively funnel garbage to specific collection points. Working with a team of over 100 people, he recently released a 528-page feasibility study (PDF) detailing how the complex technology works…
The Ocean Cleanup: The Solution to Ocean Pollution (+Video), Epoch Time
Dutch engineer Boyan Slat, has spent his teenage years searching for a solution to clean the oceans of pollution. During a scuba diving holiday in Greece aged 16, he found there were more plastic bags than fish in the sea…
Aerospace Student Boyan Slat Invents Cleanup System For Plastic Choking Our Oceans, Clean Technica (Uploaded 04-07-2013)
19-year-old Boyan Slat’s impassioned and educated opinion reminds us that youth, with its promising vital force, often taps into genius. If he is correct, Slat has designated some flair for environmental cleanup. Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans…
