By Valley, Jointing.Media, in Guangzhou, 2025-07-12

On the Pacific Ocean, an engineering vessel slowly approaches a massive C-shaped floating barrier. Under the sun, 60 cubic meters of plastic waste tumbles in the nets—soda bottles, tire fragments, fishing gear, even a broken plastic chair. Boyan Slat, 26, runs his hand over these remnants of human civilization, and tears suddenly well up in his eyes.

It is late 2019. His team has just successfully retrieved trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for the first time. A full eight years have passed since that adolescent dream was met with ridicule.

The fire of youthful idealism is a non-renewable resource. At 18, Boyan Slat enrolled in Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft, only to drop out a year later to devote himself entirely to cleaning the ocean. By 21, he had founded the non-profit The Ocean Cleanup; by 25, he launched the world’s largest ocean cleanup initiative. Born in July 1994, he turns 31 this year—while The Ocean Cleanup marks its 10th anniversary.

The Ocean Dream Shattered

In September 2018, tempestuous waves roared off the coast of San Francisco.  Slat stared at the radar screen, his heart drumming against his ribs.  System 001—the inaugural ocean cleanup device—had barely been deployed when alarms blared: steel cables had snapped, and the 600-meter barrier was torn apart by ocean currents.  The control room fell into dead silence.  A team engineer buried his face in his hands and sighed, “We’ve become a laughingstock in the environmental community.”

Criticism surged like a tidal wave.  Marine physicist Kim Martini publicly declared: “Without field validation, it was doomed to fail.”  Media headlines sneered: “Dutch Prodigy’s Plastic Utopia Collapses.”  That night, Slat sat alone on the pier.  Over the sound of crashing waves, he replayed a phone video from seven years earlier—footage from a diving trip in Greece: plastic bags tangled like jellyfish around coral, a dead albatross with its stomach crammed with red plastic bottle caps.

“People always say the ocean can’t be saved,” he whispered into the darkness.  “But at least I’m trying.”

A Plastic Nightmare in Adolescence

In 2011, the Aegean Sea shimmered like a sapphire—until 17-year-old Boyan Slat plunged into a nightmare. Plastic debris was everywhere: yogurt cups wedged between reefs, fishing nets strangling sea turtles, mountains of polystyrene foam littering the beach. But the most haunting sight awaited him on a remote island shore: the carcasses of hundreds of albatrosses, their bellies filled with sharp red plastic fragments clotting like blood.

“They mistake red plastic for food,” a local conservation volunteer told him, handing over an oil-stained albatross specimen. “The toxins released by this plastic are poisoning humans through the food chain.” The words struck the teenager like lightning.

Back in the Netherlands, he devoured scientific reports: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spanned 1.6 million square kilometers (larger than three Sichuan provinces combined), and traditional cleanup methods would take 79,000 years. In a lab at TU Delft, he built a model for €20—a V-shaped floating barrier that used ocean currents to concentrate plastic, with a solar-powered conveyor belt lifting waste from the water.

The Odyssey of a Lone Warrior

In March 2013, 19-year-old Boyan Slat walked out of the dean’s office clutching his withdrawal letter. In his backpack was a notebook filled with sketches; his bank account held barely €200. His idea was simple yet revolutionary: instead of chasing plastic, he would leverage ocean currents to naturally concentrate and capture it—a floating artificial coastline that allowed garbage to come to the system.

He cycled across Rotterdam’s industrial districts, pitching The Ocean Cleanup to 300 companies. Only one replied: “We regret to say your project is unrealistic.”

The turning point came on a TEDx stage. When he showed photos of albatross carcasses filled with plastic, sobs echoed across the auditorium; when he demonstrated his barrier model, applause lasted three full minutes. The video went viral overnight: 1,500 volunteer emails poured in, and $80,000 was crowdfunded in just 15 days. An MIT professor wrote: “I’ll provide fluid dynamics support pro bono.”

A lab was set up in a abandoned shipyard. More than 100 scientists across 12 time zones collaborated, producing a 528-page feasibility report: a 3-meter-deep submerged screen would trap suspended plastics while wind and waves would allow the system to outpace and envelop debris like “dumpling wrapping.” When calculations showed half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be cleaned in a decade, the United Nations awarded this dropout the “Champion of the Earth” honor.

His design also received Delft University of Technology’s “Best Tool Design Award.”

Tracing the Source, Declaring War at the Origin

In 2020, the turbid and rushing waters of Malaysia’s Klang River became the stage for Slat’s next revolution. Aboard a solar-powered vessel named the “Interceptor,” he watched as a conveyor belt hauled mineral water bottles and plastic bags onto a sorting platform, where AI cameras automatically identified polymer types. “Look! The bin-full signal is on!” local workers cheered as they hoisted a 5-ton garbage container—equivalent to 100,000 plastic bottles.

“Eighty percent of ocean plastic originates from just 1,000 rivers worldwide,” Slat explained, pointing to clusters of red dots on a satellite map. His team had already deployed interceptors in Jakarta’s canals and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, each capable of collecting 50,000 kg of waste daily. A grander vision was unfolding: by 2025, they aimed to control 1,000 polluting rivers, while a 100-kilometer “mega-barrier” for the Pacific entered material testing.

As recovered plastic melted in power plant furnaces to generate electricity, Slat often recalled that dying sea turtle in Greece. Today, The Ocean Cleanup handles 8,000 tons of waste annually—clearing a football field’s worth of plastic from the Pacific every minute. Facing an still-urgent ecological crisis, he echoes his 17-year-old self: “When people say ‘leave the environment to the next generation,’ I stand up and say—I am here! And I act now!”

He who chases his dream in youth, dares to claim the extraordinary. Finding one’s purpose in the bloom of young adulthood and pursuing it with unwavering focus—in this sense, Slat is luckier than most of his generation.

The youth are the future and hope of humanity; technology is the tool to realize their ideals. Boyan Slat’s story continues. Idealists are not “lone warriors.” When an individual’s vision is shared and supported by many, it becomes a collective ideal. That is why, however small our strength, Jointing.Media remains committed—to amplify these voices, to turn solitary courage into shared action.