Boyan Slat from Netherlands is the 23-year-old founder of a non-profit group whose name exactly describes its purpose: Ocean Cleanup. He believes that nothing is impossible and that they could actually make the ocean clean again.

Slat was only 16 when he took a diving course while on a holiday in Greece. He expected to see beautiful things under the water but was dismayed by the sight of garbage on the seabed. That is when he made up his mind to clean the oceans.

Ocean Cleanup aims to use technology to clean the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other places in the world’s oceans where ‘gyres’, or slowly rotating currents trap huge amounts of plastic waste. Slat, an environmentalist looks at technology as an ally and believes that it could be a most powerful agent of change.

Ocean Cleanup’s plan is to create vast, V-shaped arrays of floating barriers, possibly as much as 100 kilometres in length, moored to the seabed at depths of up to 4,000 metres. These barriers will capture plastic waste as the ocean currents flow past and funnel it into the centre of the ‘V’ to be stored in floating towers, from which it can be collected by ships and brought to land for recycling.

Slat’s scheme was named one of the 25 best inventions of 2015 by Time Magazine. The Dutch government agreed to announce a grant of 500,000 Euros to help fund an Ocean Cleanup trial project in the North Sea.

Cleanup aims to have its first full-scale projects up and running by the end of 2018.