The Boy Who Wants to Clean the Oceans With Data
At the beginning, Boyan Slat was just a Dutch teenager who loved engineering. No titles, no team, just a kid who liked to take things apart. At 16, on a holiday in Greece, he went diving. He didn’t find fish. He found plastic. Bags, bottles, nets. That was the turning point: the ocean wasn’t endless, it was a dump.
The problem looked impossible. Scientists spoke of millions of tons of waste. Governments shook their heads. Too expensive, too complex. “Impossible,” they told him. For a teenager with only a laptop, it seemed hopeless. But Boyan refused to accept that.
So his journey began. He spent months studying ocean currents, programming digital models to simulate the movement of plastic. He had no money, no lab, just data and determination. He shared his idea online. Experts mocked him, calling it “naive.” But the internet believed in him. Crowdfunding exploded. Thousands of people backed him.
Then came the trials. Failed ocean tests, broken prototypes, barriers torn apart by storms. Every time it looked finished. Every time he started again. He improved the models, updated the algorithms, gathered more data.
Finally came the return with the gift. In 2019, the first The Ocean Cleanup system started removing plastic from the Pacific. Today his barriers work in rivers too, connected to sensors and digital platforms that show real-time progress. Thousands of tons already removed.
Boyan started as just a curious kid. He returned as the hero who gave the oceans hope. Not with money or power, but with data, the internet, and determination.
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC
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