The BP oil spill that occurred back in 2010 has left a huge mark on not only the environment, but also history books. But even though billions of gallons of oil was essentially dumped into the ocean, the amount of pollution that is found in it is still staggering, especially plastic. 19-year-old Boyan Slat may have come up with a solution that could remove over 7 million tons of plastic from the world’s oceans.
Slat unveiled his plans to help create an Ocean Cleanup Array that would consist of an anchored network of floating booms with processing platforms attached to them that can be sent to discovered garbage patches in the ocean around the world.The array would act as a giant funnel as it spans the radius of the garbage patch, forcing plastic into the direction of the attached platforms that would separate plankton from the waste and store them to be recycled.
The process of cleaning the world’s oceans with Slat’s array would take an estimated five years, which is relatively quick when you consider how many years we’ve probably been polluting our oceans with plastic.
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