A Giant Pipe Named Wilson Is Ready to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

On September 8th the ecological project, which aims to put an end to the accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, was launched. If this initiative comes out as planned, by the year 2040 the so-called “plastic continent” will have been eliminated.

Bright Side would like to tell you more about this incredible and important project.

Boyan Slat

This initiative was born from the idea of a young Dutchman named Boyan Slat, the son of Croatian immigrants.

When Boyan was 16, he was spending a beautiful vacation in Greece and decided to go diving. But he was surprised to see more plastic floating in the sea than fish. This disturbed the young man to such an extent that he began to think about how he could help the planet and clean up all the plastic.

That’s how in 2013 he came up with the ingenious idea of The Ocean Cleanup project. At that time, Boyan was only 18 years old and in order to devote all his time to this inspiring idea, the young man quit his studies at the Technical University of Delft, where he studied aerospace engineering.

After 5 years of working on the project and collecting a sufficient amount of money ($20 million dollars), they were able to finally launch the project.

The ocean cleanup

Boyan’s idea consists of a giant floating pipe that will be placed on the coast of San Francisco and will collect 5 tons of floating plastic every month. The device that was nicknamed “Wilson” will move through the Pacific Ocean thanks to marine currents and wind, and will pick up plastic waste that has a size of more than 1 centimeter in diameter. In addition, it will crack the Great Pacific garbage patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex, and is expected to make it disappear by 2040.

The plastic garbage that is captured by the pipe will be collected every 6 weeks by a boat which will take it to a destination where it will be recycled to create various products.

The project launched on September 8th. Hopefully, this initiative will inspire many more projects to clean up our oceans. But remember that no project will help change the situation if we don’t change the way we treat our planet. If we all do our part and stop throwing garbage anywhere we please, very soon we will see positive changes in our surroundings.

What do you think of Boyan’s project? Do you believe in its successful outcome? Tell us in the comments!