Watch out Pacific garbage patch

The Ocean Cleanup has begun, last Sunday I watched the launch of System 001 from Alameda on a live stream with my teenage sons, it was a long slow video with little happening, yet it captured our full attention. This long tube of plastic being towed out of the harbour and heading into the high seas is an audacious attempt to clean up the huge mess of plastic waste that swirls around in our oceans and it is the culmination of 8 years of research and redesign. One week later it has reached its test site.

As a 16-year-old Dutch Boyan Slat saw the problem while scuba diving off the coast of Greece and started trying to design a way to solve it.

Boyan Slat is one teenager who defies the stereotypes, resilient, adaptable, and of course innovative. He has assembled a fantastic team and created a huge volume of research and inspired a generation to do something other than complain about global problems and lobby others to do something.

This is what is perhaps most important of all for me, watching the snide comments pop up is all too depressingly familiar, the disbelievers, the critics, mutter ‘this won’t work’, if it does ‘it won’t solve the problem’. These are the two camps that the naysayers armchair tweets and blogs fall into.

And this time I am definitely not in their camp, I really do think they are all wrong. This is what this kid has, not just vision but the strength of character to see it through. If this project fails, that will be the start of the next chapter, and if necessary the next. He will get right back up and carry on. This young man has persistence, he is here for the long game. This is not a one-hit wonder.

This is what we need. So Thankyou for the inspiration Boyan. I will be following your progress. And I will get on with making a difference in my own backyard too.

After all, it only takes 2 minutes..