Keep Fingers Crossed As World’s Most Ambitious Ocean Cleanup Starts Today

When he was 16, Boyan Slat, a boy from the Netherlands, went diving in the sea off Greece. What he saw changed him forever.

“There was more plastic than fish,” Slat recalled. He is now 24. For eight years, he has been trying to figure out how to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.

That’s a mess made up of nearly 5 trillion pieces of plastic, floating under the surface, slowly killing marine life, and causing an annual financial loss of $13 billion, the UN estimates. On September 8, Slat will start his dream project of ridding the ocean of plastic. Here’s how…