I
don’t know about you but photos of the big patch of plastic and garbage
floating in the ocean scares me more than almost anything else. Nearly 90% of
plastic bottles are not recycled, instead taking thousands of years to
decompose. If you are used to toting around your green tea, juice or iced
coffee in plastic, get a cool-looking thermos instead. This is a great choice
for the environment, your wallet, and possibly your health. You can guzzle as
much as you want and still be “green.”
Global warming isn’t the only environmental nightmare that
scientists are struggling to solve.
Millions of tons of plastic waste litter the world’s oceans,
converging together in rotating currents called gyres and blanketing the
water’s surface. On average, these gyres now hold six times more plastic than
plankton by dry weight.
Fortunately, 19-year-old Boyan Slat, founder and president of The
Ocean Cleanup, claims to “have invented a method to clean up almost half of
the great Pacific’s garbage patch in just 10 years, using currents to [his]
advantage.”
The self-described environmentalist and entrepreneur first
presented his revolutionary ideas at a TEDx Talk in the Netherlands and was recently named one of Intel’s 20 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs Worldwide
(Intel EYE50).
Slat first became aware of the problem while diving in Greece,
frustrated that he was “coming across more plastic bags than fish.”
He asked himself, “Why can’t we clean this up?”
At least one million birds and another 100,000 marine mammals
die each year from the plastic, and a number of species risk extinction due to
the massive amounts of plastic circulating the oceans.
Economically, marine
debris costs an estimated $1.27 billion annually in fishing and vessel damage
on America’s Pacific coastal waters
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