07/06/13 The Ocean Cleanup - Boyan Slat

Problem: The plastic is not static, it moves around.

Solution: Why move through the oceans, if the oceans can move through you?
Fix the sea water processors to the sea bed, and save vast amounts of funds, manpower and emissions.

www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/ 1/3
07/06/13 The Ocean Cleanup - Boyan Slat

Problem:Oceanic 'Garbage Patches' are huge, and cleaning them up would result in huge amounts of by-catches.
Furthermore there is a huge variety in debris sizes.
Solution: By using floating booms instead of nets, much larger areas will covered.
No mesh means that even the smallest particles will be diverted and extracted. No mesh - together with its low speed - will result to virtually no by-catch.
Although this hypothesis still has to be tested, even the planktonic species - due to their density being close to that of the sea water - may move under the
booms along with the water flow.

Problems: A clean-up operation would generate significant emissions. Besides that, in high seas much plastic would escape.
Solution: The platforms will be completely self-supportive, receiving their energy from e.g. the sun, currents and waves.
And by letting the platforms' wings sway like an actual manta ray, we can ensure contacts of the inlets with the surface, even in the roughest weather.

www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/ 2/3
07/06/13 The Ocean Cleanup - Boyan Slat

Problem: Conventional clean-up ideas have never been financially realistic, let alone remediation of millions of square kilometres.
Solution: This concept is so efficient, that we estimate that by selling the plastic retrieved from the 5 gyres, we would make in fact more
money than the plan would cost to execute. In other words; it may potentially be profitable.

PLEASE READ THIS FIRST

The last couple of days several (spontaneous) articles have been published, claiming The Ocean Cleanup Array is a 'feasible method' of
extracting plastic from the gyres.
This is an incorrect statement; we are currently only at about 1/4th of completing our feasibility study. Only after finishing that study, we
believe such statements should be made. Although the preliminary results look promising, and our team of about 50 engineers, modellers,
external experts and students is making good progress, we had and have no intention of presenting a concept as a feasible solution while
still being in investigative phase.

Please stay tuned for this study, which will be published online in several months' time.
We kindly request the press to refrain from any further publication, until all assumptions of this concept have been confirmed.

Thank you.

© Boyan Slat - carbon neutral website

www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/ 3/3