The plastic island
and its hero
Boyan Slat
This ocean dump is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris trapped in the currents of the North Pacific Ocean Gyre.
Its nickname, the seventh continent, already says it all and it is no wonder. The “Island of Debris” that floats in the Pacific is three times the size of France and is the world’s largest ocean dump with 1.8 trillion pieces of floating plastic that kill thousands of marine animals between California and Hawaii each year.
It is over 60 years old and is the largest plastic island in the world. Its size is immense. It is estimated that it occupies more than 1.8 million square kilometers with more than 80,000 million pieces of floating plastic.
There are also other plastic islands:
1. PLASTIC ISLAND OF THE INDIAN OCEAN
It is the second largest and although its existence had been hypothesized since 1988, it was officially discovered in 2010. It has an approximate density of 10,000 waste per square kilometer.
2. ATLANTIC OCEAN ISLAND
Discovered in 1972, it is ahead of the United States and Mexico. However, it is famous for its high waste density. It is driven by the North Atlantic current.
3. SOUTH PACIFIC ISLAND
It has recently been discovered off the coasts of Chile and Peru, and mainly contains micro fragments of plastic materials eroded by the passage of time and atmospheric agents.
The company Ocean Cleanup that was created by BOYAN SLAT
The dream of Boyan Slat, a young Dutch man born in 1994 in the town of Delft, Netherlands, is to clean the seas and oceans of floating plastic around the world. His project The Ocean Clean Up has raised 1.8 million euros through a Crowdfunding campaign and has won one of the “Champions of the Earth” awards from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
Boyan Slat was still in high school when he came up with the idea of using natural ocean currents and winds to concentrate passively plastic into floating barriers, from where it is collected for later recycling with the help of a floating platform powered by solar energy.
