Episode Transcript: #1402 - Boyan Slat

What's up, fella? How are you? Good to see you again, man.

Likewise.

I've been reading that you are having some great success with your machine, finally.

Everything's up and running. Last time we talked, you had yet to implement it, actually, out in the wild.

And now you... Explain to us what happened. You had some bumps in the beginning, right?

Yes.

Yeah, so it's been quite a few years. Finally, something's happening.

So we launched our first ocean system from San Francisco in September of last year.

And we took it out and roughly two months later, we figured that, first of all, it wasn't catching plastic.

So what we saw was that the system was moving at roughly the same speed as the plastic.

So maybe you just take one step back, the idea and how it works.

So of course, we have this great Pacific garbage patch between here and Hawaii, twice the size of Texas,

100 million kilos of plastic doesn't go away by itself.

And the idea was to have this artificial coastline that is driven by the forces of the ocean.

We put it in there and the plastic naturally accumulates against it and kind of stays in there

so we can then periodically get it out because the big challenge is that,

although there's a lot of plastic, it's spread out over this vast area.

So we first have to concentrate it before we can take it out because if you were to simply

troll the ocean for plastic with boats and nets, it would just take forever really.