When self-described “ocean custodian” Boyan Slat took the stage at TED 2025 in Vancouver this week, he showed viewers a reality many of us are already heartbreakingly familiar with: There is a lot of trash in the ocean.
“If we allow current trends to continue, the amount of plastic that’s entering the ocean is actually set to double by 2060,” Slat said in his TED Talk, which will be published online at a later date.
Plus, once plastic is in the ocean, it accumulates in “giant circular currents” called gyres, which Slat said operate a lot like the drain of the bathtub, meaning that plastic can enter these currents but cannot leave.
That’s how we get enormous build-ups like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant collection of plastic pollution in the ocean that is roughly twice the size of Texas.
As the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, Slat’s goal is to return our oceans to their original, clean state before 2040. To accomplish this, two things must be done.
First: Stop more plastic from entering the ocean. Second: Clean up the “legacy” pollution that is already out there and doesn’t go away by itself.
And Slat is well on his way.
When Slat’s first TEDx Talk went viral in 2012, he was able to organize research teams to create the first-ever map of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. From there, they created a technology to collect plastic from the most garbage-heavy areas in the ocean.
“We imagined a very long, u-shaped barrier … that would be pushed by wind and waves,” Slat explained in his Talk.
This barrier would act as a funnel to collect garbage and be emptied out for recycling.
But there was a problem.
“We took it out in the ocean, and deployed it, and it didn’t collect plastic,” Slat said, “which is a pretty important requirement for an ocean cleanup system.”
Soon after, this first system broke into two. But a few days later, his team was already back to the drawing board.
From here, they added vessels that would tow the system forward, allowing it to sweep a larger area and move more methodically through the water. Mesh attached to the barrier would gather plastic and guide it to a retention area, where it would be extracted and loaded onto a ship for sorting, processing, and recycling.
It worked.
“For 60 years, humanity had been putting plastic into the ocean, but from that day onwards, we were also taking it back out again,” Slat said, with a video of the technology in action playing on screen behind him.
To applause, he said: “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, honestly.”
Over the years, Ocean Cleanup has scaled up this cleanup barrier, now measuring almost 2.5 kilometers — or about 1.5 miles — in length. And it cleans up an area of the ocean the size of a football field every five seconds.
The system is designed to be safe for marine life, and once plastic is brought to land, it is recycled into new products, like sunglasses, accessories for electric vehicles, and even Coldplay’s latest vinyl record, according to Slat.
These products fund the continuation of the cleanup. The next step of the project is to use drones to target areas of the ocean that have the highest plastic concentration.
In September 2024, Ocean Cleanup predicted the Patch would be cleaned up within 10 years.
However, on April 8, Slat estimated “that this fleet of systems can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in as little as five years’ time.”
With ongoing support from MCS, a Netherlands-based Nokia company, Ocean Cleanup can quickly scale its reliable, real-time data and video communication to best target the problem.
It’s the largest ocean cleanup in history.
But what about the plastic pollution coming into the ocean through rivers across the world? Ocean Cleanup is working on that, too.
To study plastic pollution in other waterways, Ocean Cleanup attached AI cameras to bridges, measuring the flow of trash in dozens of rivers around the world, creating the first global model to predict where plastic is entering oceans.
“We discovered: Just 1% of the world’s rivers are responsible for about 80% of the plastic entering our oceans,” Slat said.
His team found that coastal cities in middle-income countries were primarily responsible, as people living in these areas have enough wealth to buy things packaged in plastic, but governments can’t afford robust waste management infrastructure.
Ocean Cleanup now tackles those 1% of rivers to capture the plastic before it reaches oceans.
“It’s not a replacement for the slow but important work that’s being done to fix a broken system upstream,” Slat said. “But we believe that tackling this 1% of rivers provides us with the only way to rapidly close the gap.”
To clean up plastic waste in rivers, Ocean Cleanup has implemented technology called “interceptors,” which include solar-powered trash collectors and mobile systems in eight countries worldwide.
In Guatemala, an interceptor captured 1.4 million kilograms (or over 3 million pounds) of trash in under two hours. Now, this kind of collection happens up to three times a week.
“All of that would have ended up in the sea,” Slat said.
Now, interceptors are being brought to 30 cities around the world, targeting waterways that bring the most trash into our oceans. GPS trackers also mimic the flow of the plastic to help strategically deploy the systems for the most impact.
“We can already stop up to one-third of all the plastic entering our oceans once these are deployed,” Slat said.
And as soon as he finished his Talk on the TED stage, Slat was told that TED’s Audacious Project would be funding the deployment of Ocean Cleanup’s efforts in those 30 cities as part of the organization’s next cohort of grantees.
While it is unclear how much support Ocean Cleanup will receive from the Audacious Project, Head of TED Chris Anderson told Slat: “We’re inspired. We’re determined in this community to raise the money you need to make that 30-city project happen.”
And Slat himself is determined to clean the oceans for good.
“For humanity to thrive, we need to be optimistic about the future,” Slat said, closing out his Talk.
“Once the oceans are clean again, it can be this example of how, through hard work and ingenuity, we can solve the big problems of our time.”
Header image courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup Project
