Boyan’s tinkering began at age 2 and he was soon building treehouses and ziplines and experimenting with explosives. His father was a Croatian artist and his mother, who raised him, a Dutch-British consultant for foreigners relocating to Holland. He was 18 years old.Ī little more than five years later, Slat has raised more than $40 million for his startup, assembled an engineering-heavy staff of 70 and worked through multiple design iterations, leading to the one now being assembled at the former Naval Air Station Alameda in California.The trajectory that seems so outlandish to strangers is slightly less so to those who have known Slat from childhood. Uncannily confident, Slat used a TEDx talk in 2012 in his native Netherlands to announce that a solution to one of the world’s most intractable environmental problems was within grasp. The Ocean Cleanup’s profile has been elevated by its media-genic founder and leader. An Ocean Cleanup prototype after its unveiling to the press on Jin The Hague, Netherlands. That is why I am convinced they are going to have some success.” Just how much success, he said, remains to be seen. “They are doing a very thoughtful well-designed process to get to where they want to go.

“But the more I dove in and got more and more detail, the more I changed my mind,” said Spinrad, now a professor at Oregon State University. The Ocean Cleanup seemed big, brazen and bound to struggle when it was introduced in 2016 to Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who was chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Oceans by Simon Holland