This Startup A Load Of Garbage?

Famous fans in Silicon Valley gave $30 million to an amateur to launch his Ocean Cleanup system into the Pacific. Experts say the endeavour is nuts

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Of all the things San Francisco has brought into the wider world, few have been as big and curious-looking as Ocean Cleanup’s System 001, the contraption an offshore supply ship towed to sea through the Golden Gate last month. Black, snakelike, and 2,000 feet long, System 001 was starting a 1,300mile journey to a remote garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. When it arrives in mid-October, it will spend a year drifting around in a circular current, gathering plastic like a gigantic pool skimmer.

The idea can be credited to Boyan Slat, a slight, 23-year-old Dutchman of Croatian descent with a mop of curly brown hair. He became concerned about ocean debris when he was 16 and has since raised over $30 million from Salesforce.com Inc. co-founder Marc Benioff, Palantir Technologies Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel, and others to try to prove that rigs like Ocean Cleanup’s can, in great enough numbers, help rid the oceans of plastic by 2050.

There’s just one problem, say ocean scientists: The device can’t possibly work on the scale imagined and could end up just another piece of drifting litter. “People think that it’s an easy, sexy solution, but it’s not,” says Kim Martini, a postdoctoral oceanography researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Given that only single-digit percentages of the plastic entering oceans each year wind up in the garbage patches, “it’s clear that the problem is much bigger than what we’re able to solve,” acknowledges Ocean Cleanup spokesman Joost Dubois.

Slat says Ocean Cleanup has conducted extensive modeling and prototype testing and that the outcry from his more credentialed peers (he dropped out of college) just proves he’s onto something. “If you don’t have any critics, it means that what you’re doing is easy and obvious,” he says.