#1402 - Boyan Slat

Joe Rogan (0:03)

What's up, fella? How are you? Good to see you again, man.

Boyan Slat (0:05)

Likewise.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

I've been reading that you are having some great success with your machine, finally.

Everything's up and running. Last time we talked, you had yet to implement it, actually out in the wild, and now you, explain to us what happened. You had some bumps in the beginning, right?

Boyan Slat (0:21)

Yes, yeah. So, it's been quite a few years. Finally, something's happening.

So, we launched our first ocean system from San Francisco in September of last year, and we took it out, and roughly two months later, we figured that, first of all, it wasn't catching plastic. So, what we saw was that the system was moving at roughly the same speed as the plastic. So, maybe just take one step back, the idea and how it works. So, of course, we have this great Pacific garbage patch between here and Hawaii, twice the size of Texas, 100 million kilos of plastic, doesn't go away by itself.

And the idea was to have this artificial coastline that is driven by the forces of the ocean. We put it in there, and the plastic naturally accumulates against it and kind of stays in there, so we can then periodically get it out, because the big challenge is that, although there's a lot of plastic, it's spread out over this vast area. So, we first have to concentrate it before we can take it out, because if you were to simply troll the ocean for plastic with boats and nets, it would just take forever, really. So, the idea was to have those artificial coastlines. We deployed the first one, and then what we saw was that somehow the system was moving at the same speed as the plastic. So, you can imagine if this is like your Pac-Man and this is your catch and is moving at the same speed, it's not going in, and sometimes it did go in, but it went out again.

Joe Rogan (1:56)

We got a video of it, what it was doing.

Boyan Slat (1:58)

Oh, that's great, yeah.

So, this is the basic idea, but it wasn't doing that. So, and then we thought, okay, that's all right, we'll learn from it, we'll try and adjust the systems, and then literally exactly a year ago, the system broke into two, and so with the structural failure, forcing us to tow the whole thing back to land, and go back to the drawing board. So, we didn't have the best start of this year.

Joe Rogan (2:26)

How much time has been lost? Or how much time has been spent, I should say, in the beginning phase, the initial version that you launched, versus where you're at now?

Boyan Slat (2:35)

So, we've been going on at this for, since 2013

Yeah, so basically after five years launching it and seeing it break into two, that wasn't the best start of the year I could have imagined. But then, you know, went to the drawing board, and the team really took it well, and we took those lessons into account, adjusted the design and relaunch, really just a few months later, so in June.

And this time we made the system a bit more modular, so we could try different things to try and adjust the speed, make it go faster, make it go slower. And then what we figured was, well, the system isn't going fast enough. What if we actually turn the problem into a solution? What if we turn it around and actually slow it down so that it goes slower than the plastic? And then what we figured, that actually works. And in October, we announced that we're actually catching plastic. And really just last week, the first two shipping containers full of plastic were landed in port.

Joe Rogan (3:36)

Wow, so it's really recently up and running the way you expected it. Now, how long does it take to accumulate two shipping containers full?

Boyan Slat (3:44)

So that was roughly month, month and a half.

Joe Rogan (3:47)

And how big are these shipping containers?

Boyan Slat (3:49)

20 foot, so 42 of these rooms.

Joe Rogan (3:51)

So the only thing that's really stopping it from getting more is like the actual size of the net itself.

Boyan Slat (3:56)

Yes, so that's the next step. So now that we kind of went from zero to one, we have the basic principle of catching plastic confirmed. We now have to make it bigger before we can build a whole fleet of them because we reckon we need maybe 50 or 100 of them to really clean up half this batch in five years. That's the objective.