20-year-old inventor's plan to rid the seas of plastic with a mile-long floating trap

A 20-year-old Dutchman believes he has come up with a solution to the ocean's plastic problem.

Boyan Slat, the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, announced this week that his company plans to deploy a series of V-shaped floating barriers that would capture trash without harming sea life. The first installation - spanning 1.2 miles and looking from above like booms used to cleanup oil spills - is set to be deployed next year off the coast of Tsushima, an island located between Japan and South Korea.

Tsushima was chosen in part because it is inundated with massive amounts of plastic, with approximately one cubic meter of pollution per person washing up each year. The system is scheduled to operate for two years, with talks underway for using the collected plastic as an alternative energy source on Tsushima.

"Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today," said Slat, who came up with his concept while in high school. "Not only will this first cleanup array contribute to cleaner waters and coasts, but it simultaneously is an essential step towards our goal of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This deployment will enable us to study the system's efficiency and durability over time."

Instead of using nets and vessels to remove the plastic from the water, Slat's proposal would use natural ocean currents and winds to passively transport the plastic to a series of collection platforms.

If all goes well, Slat hopes to place the system in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the North Pacific between Hawaii and California that has become a key collection point for marine debris.

Over the next five years, he plans to scale up his system to the point where he could deploy platforms spanning 62 miles in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Slat has estimated it could capture almost half of the plastic in the Garbage Patch over 10 years.

Slat, who in 2014 launched a $2 million crowd funding campaign to support the project, claims that over 100 scientists examining the concept have concluded that it was a "viable method to clean the oceans from plastic."

There is no doubt that plastic debris in the ocean is a problem in search of a solution. A study in December found that there are 5 trillion pieces of plastic are polluting the oceans, causing harm to marine life which often gets entangled in fishing lines or ingests these toxic substances.

But not everyone is convinced that Slat has the solution, including those who question whether the system could capture microplastics that are the most dominate types of debris and ensure that the marine life would not get trapped in it.

"There's a whole ecosystem thriving in surface waters that is driven by ocean currents," Capt. Charles Moore, a co-author of the December study and the founder of the marine education and research group Algalita, said. "Interrupting the flow and harvesting everything can create problems for surface-dwelling organisms. The ecosystem I described is threatened by plastic pollution, so the devilish tradeoff between restoration and destruction must be thoroughly evaluated."