Episode 27: The Great Ocean Cleanup

Inventor Boyan Slat is on a mission to rid oceans of plastic. His team at The Ocean Cleanup designs and deploys systems that pull trash from the open ocean — now, he’s stopping the pollution at its source: rivers where plastic is easier to catch, like those in Jamaica’s Kingston Harbor.

Each year an estimated four million tons of plastic end up in the world’s oceans, killing thousands of marine creatures and accumulating up the food chain. The plastic gathers in five massive ocean gyres, the largest of which carries 87,000 tons of trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After years of research and trials, The Ocean Clean Up has created a working system that can remove 7000 kilos of trash every day and a half, and aims to remove 90% of the floating ocean plastic by 2040.

But plastics keep flowing into the ocean, largely from the world’s most polluted rivers. In Jamaica, Boyan’s team has allied with Alecia Beaufort and a local group already cleaning up their waterways.  Together, they’ve deployed a new system to trap plastic at the source as it flows downriver during a storm. Their work is the proof Boyan envisioned, that seeing is believing, and that belief spurs further action.