Boyan Slat

Boyan Slat (born 27 July 1994) is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur.

A former aerospace engineering student, he is the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.

In 2011, Slat went diving and found that the amount of plastic surpassed the number of fish in the area he explored.

He made ocean plastic pollution the subject of a high school project examining why it was considered impossible to clean up.

He later came up with the idea of building a passive plastic catchment system, using circulating ocean currents to net plastic waste, which he presented at a TEDx talk in Delft in 2012.

Slat discontinued his aerospace engineering studies at TU Delft to devote his time to developing his idea.

He founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, and shortly after, his TEDx talk went viral after being shared on several news sites.

"Technology is the most potent agent of change. It is an amplifier of our human capabilities", Slat wrote in The Economist.

"Whereas other change-agents rely on reshuffling the existing building blocks of society, technological innovation creates entirely new ones, expanding our problem-solving toolbox."

In 2013 Slat founded the non-profit The Ocean Cleanup, of which he serves as the CEO.

The group's mission is to develop advanced technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

It raised US$2.2million through a crowd funding campaign with the help of 38,000 donors from 160 countries.

In June 2014, the Ocean Cleanup published a 528-page feasibility study about the project's potential.

Some declared the concept unfeasible in a technical critique of the feasibility study on the Deep Sea News website, which was cited by other publications, including Popular Science and The Guardian.

Since the Ocean Cleanup started, the organization has raised tens of millions of dollars in donations from entrepreneurs in Europe and in Silicon Valley, including Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

The first and second systems, dubbed Systems 001 and 001/B respectively, encountered various technical failures.

System 001 was unable to effectively retain plastic and suffered structural stress damage that caused an 18-meter section to break off at one point.

However, in 2019, System 001/B, which was a redesign of System 001, successfully captured plastic.

This first mission (which includes both systems) returned 60 bags of garbage.

In July 2021, System 002, an updated version, gathered 9,000 kg of trash.

At an unveiling of a new cleanup system dubbed The Interceptor, Slat cited research from the company which showed that 1,000 of the world's most polluted rivers were responsible for roughly 80% of the world's plastic pollution.

In an effort to "close the tap" and drastically reduce the amount of plastic entering the world's oceans, The Ocean Cleanup had devised a barge-like system that was completely solar powered and was aimed to be a scalable solution that could be deployed around the world's rivers.

As of mid 2022, Interceptors have been deployed in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, and are prepared to be deployed in Thailand and Los Angeles, California.

Born in the Netherlands, Slat is of Croatian descent through his father.