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Riley Rochester

Dr. Tabitha Clark 

ENGW 3302

October 26, 2020 

Firsthand Research Plan

Method

I will be conducting an interview with Boyan Slat to discuss the Great Pacific Garbage

Patch (GPGP) in relation to his nonprofit organization, The Ocean Cleanup (TOC). Slat is the

CEO of TOC, which he founded in 2013 to develop technology to remove plastic pollution from

the world’s oceans. Slat’s work is particularly relevant to my own research because we share the

same eventual goal: to rid the ocean of plastic and clean up the GPGP. If Slat himself is not

available, I will request to speak with the Head of Engineering, Arjan Verschoor, another

member of the TOC team who works closely with Slat.

I will first reach out to Slat via email to ask for the interview, and we will discuss the

types of questions I will be asking, the purpose of the interview, and I will get his consent to

record his answers. Since TOC is headquartered in the Netherlands, our conversation will take

place online via video chat, likely through Zoom, since it is accessible with a free to use version,

and Northeastern University gives me access to the unlimited version. The Netherlands are in the

Central European Standard Time zone, which is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time,

which I use, so the interview will likely need to take place sometime in the morning for me so

that it will still be early afternoon for Slat. I expect that the interview will take between 45

minutes and an hour, in which time Slat and I will discuss his research and its probable global

application. I will spend at most one week reviewing our conversation, after which time I will
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decide whether or not I need to reach out for a follow up interview. If I do not, I will send Slat

and his team a thank you email to show my appreciation for his time, else I will request to set up

the follow up interview, after which I will send the thank you email.

Questions for Research

1. Tell me about the trip to Greece that first brought the garbage patches to your attention.

What about it stood out to you so much?

2. How did you decide to drop out of TU Delft to pursue The Ocean Cleanup?

3. What is your take on the modern-day plastic economy?

4. What is your idealized plan to deal with all of the marine plastics TOC will collect? How

realistic do you find this plan?

5. How will your cleanup system, the Interceptor, work on a large scale (i.e. in the North

Pacific)?

6. Is there something about the North Pacific that makes its garbage patch worse than those

in other oceans or seas?

7. How does the Interceptor deal with the issue of cleaning up extant marine microplastics

while avoiding capturing the vulnerable flora and fauna of the same size?

8. While your main concern is floating or suspended oceanic pollution, how would you plan

to go about removing and recycling the trash that has collected at the bottom of the ocean

beneath the garbage patch, keeping in mind trawling’s dangerous impact on marine life?

9. TOC’s website calls the garbage patch situation a “ticking time bomb,” (The Ocean

Cleanup 2020). What do you mean by this, and how long do you estimate we have until

detonation?
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10. Do you think we will ever see a plastic-free ocean in our lifetime? What will lead us

there?

Speculation

Many of the answers to the above questions can be speculated based upon Slat’s previous

interviews, his website, and The Ocean Cleanup’s website. No one else is anywhere near ready

to complete the monumental task of cleaning the ocean, but Slat’s unique position in the

endeavor gives him an insight as to how the state of it came to be, and how the task might soon

progress.

The first four questions in my line up are more personal to Slat, asking about his

motivations and opinions. For example, the answer to the first question will delve into a trip he

took to Greece when he was 16 where he famously saw more plastic than fish while diving in the

ocean, piquing his interest in marine plastics and eventually yielding the projects in place today.

Likewise, part of his answer to the next question will pertain to the founding of The Ocean

Cleanup, which he wanted to spend more time developing. I can easily speculate that the CEO

would disparage the modern plastic economy, due to its direct role in the pollution of the sea.

The World Economic Forum (2016) published a report which “outlines a fundamental rethink for

plastic packaging and plastics in general; it offers a new approach with the potential to transform

global plastic packaging material flows and thereby usher in the New Plastics Economy,” (p.6).

Slat would probably be a strong proponent of the New Plastics Economy, as he is an advocate of

intensive marine plastic recycling programs. His eventual goal is for recycled ocean plastics to

become a selling point such that it will become a value to the market, such as the recycled

sunglasses sold by The Ocean Cleanup as a fundraiser (Slat 2019).

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The next four questions are specific to his work relating to the oceanic garbage patches.

Larger systems can cover more surface area along the Patches, gathering and recovering greater

amounts of pollutants. Upon speculation, the system should be directly scalable from prototypes

in the North Sea to the Pacific Ocean (Evans-Pughe 2017). The most probable reason the Great

Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest and most commonly known patch is simply because the

Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world, surrounded by four currents which form a gyre

that sucks plastic into its center (Parker 2013). According to The Ocean Cleanup (2020), the

Interceptor is “designed to capture plastics ranging from small pieces just millimeters in size, up

to large debris.” Yet while it does not have the capacity at present to handle the removal of

microplastics smaller than a few millimeters, it also has little to no impact on marine life. If Slat

were to attempt to take on the trash along the sea floor, he would probably try to use a similar

ethos as he does on the surface, involving a passive collection mechanism and an active removal.

The final two questions broach the subject of the near future. In calling the garbage

patches “ticking time bomb[s],” Slat was probably referring to the degradation of the pollution

into such small and prevalent microplastics that their removal will become entirely impossible

(The Ocean Cleanup 2020). I can’t say with any degree of certainty whether or not we will ever

see a plastic free ocean in our lifetime, but I’d like to think that Slat would be optimistic about it.

According to The Ocean Cleanup, the goal is to pave the way for a plastic-free ocean by 2050,

though of course this is a moonshot project. Ultimately, Slat is the only big contender in the

endeavor to remove plastic pollution from the ocean.

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References

Slat, B. (2019). Boyan Slat. https://www.boyanslat.com/

Evans-Pughe, C. (2017). All at sea: Cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Engineering &

Technology, 12(1), 52–55. https://doi.org/10.1049/et.2017.0105

Parker, D. (2013). Garbage Patches. OR&R's Marine Debris Program.

https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html.

The Ocean Cleanup. (2020). https://theoceancleanup.com/

World Economic Forum. (2016). The new plastics economy: Rethinking the future of plastics.

World Economic Forum REF 080116.

http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_New_Plastics_Economy.pdf