Boyan Slat is a student of Aerospace Engineering, entrepreneur and also the inventor of waste engines at sea. He was born in Delft, The Netherlands, July 27, 1994. Unconsciously since childhood, Boyan has seen someone who is genius and care about the environment.
This handsome man was once recorded in the award of the Guinness World Record for having successfully launched 213 water rockets simultaneously. He is also ambitious to clean ocean oceans from plastic waste.
Appears the idea of cleaning this garbage begins when Boyan is doing diving in the Greek archipelago area. Boyan was surprised to find more plastic waste than fish in the ocean and no one cared about this, not even the local authorities were trying to figure out the right solution.
According to Boyan, it takes thousands of years if only rely on the removal of plastic waste in the sea by using the ship. This makes Boyan decided to focus on becoming CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup at the time he was just 18 years old.
The Ocean Cleanup is a company that develops systems to clean up sea litter in the world. To set up this company Boyan vigorously doing public funding and get money of two million dollars. Then he earned ten million dollars from philanthropic donors, such as Marc Benioff, Peter Thiel, Paypal and the neighbors who lived around Boyan’s house. Until now, Ocean Cleanup is also doing development along with the increase of donations of funds from various circles of society.
The first area to be Boyan’s destination is Tsushima Beach located between the islands of Japan and the peninsula of South Korea. This waste cleaner is installed with a range that extends about 2 kilometers, which will be the world’s longest floating structure.
In addition, the local government of Tsushima Island is studying the plastics, so that plastic waste that has been successfully transported by the team of The Ocean Cleanup will be used as an alternative energy source.
In practice the tool Boyan creates will connect the boundary to the bottom of the sea, which will catch the floating trash and then collect. Then all the plastic waste will move along the boundary to a platform above sea level. Half of this success makes Boyan determined to do trash collection in the area of Hawaii and California.
In the last 40 years, millions of tons of plastic have already flooded the world’s oceans. There are 288 tons of plastics produced per year, 10 percent goes directly to the oceans, while 80 percent comes from the plastic waste of land dumped into the road and then swept into the river and possibly into the ocean as the final destination.
In 2018, Boyan is focusing on a full-scale operational system to clean up garbage in the Pacific Ocean. There are many awards that Boyan has received for his success because of participating in environmental issue. He is also one of the youngest recipients of the highest UN environmental award.
Despite Boyan’s many positive support, some people consider it somewhat doubtful because it can disrupt the balance of marine life, especially the fish located at sea level. There is even a thought, cleaning garbage in the sea is not a priority, the thing that should be prioritized is to prevent landfill into the ocean instead of the sea.
According to Boyan, every action is definitely a high risk and there is also a chance to fail. Boyan Slat has tried and contributed in terms of maintaining the environment by cleaning up plastic waste scattered on the beach and in the ocean waters. Actually, in this case, every individual must participate in maintaining the environment, especially in the use of plastics, because if plastic waste increases we can not rely on government or any institution to overcome it.
