Culture
Could A 62-Mile Floating Wall Clean Up the Ocean?
The system would capture plastic garbage making up the Pacific Ocean’s “vortex” of trash.
Three years ago, Boyan Slat was a precocious 18-year-old on a TEDx stage in the Netherlands, eloquently introducing people to his radical idea to clean up the ocean. He would build a network of floating walls that would work with the oceans’ currents to catch the millions—maybe even trillions—of tons of plastic waste. The motion of the ocean would essentially make it self-cleaning.
Coming from a kid not even in his twenties, the idea was impressive and the video of his talk quickly went viral. But his idea was just that: an idea.