NEW YORK: Two years ago, Boyan Slat, a then 19-year-old Aerospace Engineering student at TU Delft in Holland, made the claim he could cleanup the oceans vast accumulation of plastics and other marine garbage in about five years.
Plastic is cheap, versatile and useful, and there is no denying that. But because plastic doesn’t degrade easily, it has become part and parcel of an environmental disaster.
Currently, the world produces around 300 million tons of plastics every year, and since the 1950s, we have produced about six billion metric tons of the stuff. Plastics are clogging our landfills, polluting the landscape and the oceans, choking our rivers and streams, and is even caught up in the Arctic ice. This man-made, versatile and cheap technology is also killing our wildlife.
