5.

In 2018, The Ocean Cleanup launches.

Floating plastic, which never decomposes, poses a threat to all levels of the food chain and sea life , including sea turtles and birds that mistake it for food; the undigestible plastic clogs up their digestive tracts and ultimately kills them. Scientists have estimated that there are 7.25 million tons of extractable plastic in the oceans. The Ocean Cleanup seeks to dramatically reduce the levels of plastic in the ocean.

The Ocean Cleanup is the result of a then-16-year-old’s high-school science project to figure out how to strip plastic flotsam and jetsam from the world’s oceans. The answer:  Use the motion of the sea to sweep plastic into large floating nets that skim the surface without trapping plankton or other sea life. His resulting non-profit organization estimates that a full-scale deployment of their systems will clean up 50 % of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 5 years.

The system has been field-tested, and it works. Learn more here.

Human ingenuity created many (most) of the world’s problems. Certainly, most of them are solvable or, at least, highly improvable.

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