The Youth Impact

How Young People Have Made an Impact on the Preservation of our Planet

By Bianca Sirbu

Boyan Slat had a dream to clean ocean waters. Seven Years on, his dream is coming true.

There are many children and teens who have raised awareness about climate change, dirty bodies of water and other environmental issues . For someone who always gets violently seasick, Boyan Slat thinks a lot about the ocean. He invented the world’s first plastic clean up system. He says he won’t be on ship with it when it will be released in San Francisco “I am not a man on the sea,” he says. After years of hard work, Slat is going to watch from dry land as System 001- a floating barrier nearly 2000 ft. long snakes its way to the Pacific ocean’s Garbage Patch. The Netherlands's based organization promoted it as “The biggest clean up of all time”.

His inspiration was a Scuba-Diving trip when he was 16, he said he looked forward to seeing many beautiful things, instead, it looked like a dump, there were more plastic bags than fish. This inspired him to make a change. He kept asking himself, why is nobody taking action?He couldn’t stop thinking about that. It took five years to complete the final machine. He asked people to raise funds to help him get the machine done. Originally, he envisioned a large boom, which would keep the trash away. With ships occasionally coming to take the trash away. That idea evolved into a plan for multiple “arrays' ', each consisted of a pipe-shaped float- sixth tenths of a mile to a mile in length- with a 10-foot-tall screen of impermeable synthetic textile hanging beneath the surface.