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How this non-profit is working to remove plastic from world's oceans

Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup CEO, discusses the nonprofit's one-of-a-kind technology designed to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

Video transcript

- Welcome back to our hour-long special, Planet Earth in Crisis. Plastic is expected to outnumber fish in the world's oceans by the middle of this century, if the current rate of waste continues. That's according to a study by the World Economic Forum.

Well, there is one nonprofit group that is hoping to change that through a global cleanup project. Let's bring in Boyan Slat. He is the founder of Ocean Cleanup. And Boyan, let's first establish where you are, because I know you're out on the water right now. Talk to me about the mission at hand and where you're conducting it.

BOYAN SLAT: Yeah, so I'm here on top of one of our interceptors, which is a solar-powered device, which are put into the mouth of rivers to catch plastic before it enters the ocean. So this one particularly is in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic. And we have three others operational, but ultimately we hope to expand this to more than 1,000 rivers around the world to stop it from going into the ocean.

- You've got an ambitious task, trying to clean or rid the world's waters of plastic waste. We've heard of these massive garbage patches that have formed. How do you go about cleaning that up, and how is your approach different than others we've seen tried?

BOYAN SLAT: Yeah, so our strategy is really twofold. On one hand, stop the source, preventing more plastic from going into the oceans and rivers. But at the same time, there's already a lot of legacy plastic in the ocean, especially this Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California. It's massive and it doesn't go away by itself. So we have to clean that up.

So for that, we've really developed the first scalable technology to do this, both on the ocean, as well as in the rivers.

- How exactly does that technology work?

BOYAN SLAT: So if you look at coastlines, coastlines are actually very effective ways of catching plastic. If you see it on the beach, it's out of the ocean, stays out of the ocean. So that's great, actually.

But the problem is that in the middle of the ocean, there are no coastlines to collect the plastic. So that's why we say, why don't we build our own coastlines? So basically we've developed very long floating barriers that we drag through the patch. And it catches and then concentrates the plastic before we can take it out.

And we're now trialing the latest iteration of that technology as we speak in the Garbage Patch. And if everything goes well, in a few weeks from now we hope to see a system completely filled with plastic. And if that works, then we can with confidence say that the technology works and we can scale this up.

- Boyan, you've got some critics out there about the way in which you're approaching this. Of course, you've gotten funding from companies like Coca-Cola, which are among the biggest plastic polluters in the world. And you're also out on a ship that some would argue is using fossil fuels. So how do you respond to that, and why partner with the very companies that are responsible for the pollution?

BOYAN SLAT: Yeah, well, that's very hard to go to the middle of the ocean and clean this up without using fuels. Batteries are just not good enough for that yet. So we do use fuels, but at the same time, we're experimenting with low carbon biofuels. And all the rest of the emissions will be offset, so the clean up will be carbon neutral.

At the same time of course, when you look at rivers and funding that, yes, there have been companies involved like Coca-Cola, besides actually the majority being philanthropic money. But I think there's two ways to look at it, either you look at it from a greenwashing lens.

But the way I look at it is that it's a pragmatic way to scale this up. I mean, companies like Coca-Cola, they don't want the ocean to be polluted with plastic. So by allowing them to to solve this problem by cleaning out their own waste, I think if anyone should be paying for this clean up, it's companies like Coca-Cola.