MOVERS & MAKERS 2018

There are over 5 trillion pieces of plastic currently littering our oceans.

Solving that will take a combination of halting plastic pollution at its source, and cleaning up the garbage that's already clogging our ocean waters. At 16, Boyan Slat stumbled across this problem on a fishing trip in Greece.

Two years later, in 2013, after a TED Talk that went viral, he founded The Ocean Cleanup to tackle it. In September 2018, he and his team of more than 70 engineers, researchers, scientists and computational modelers launched System 001, a system they hope will be the first of a fleet designed to clean up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 5 years.