The problem of ocean pollution from plastic waste is growing and intractable, and can feel insurmountable to many consumers. For Dutch innovator Boyan Slat, however, not only is the problem solvable, it’s an imperative. In addition to harming habitats and wildlife, improperly discarded plastics can cause health problems for humans, too. The founder and CEO of Rotterdam-based The Ocean Cleanup, Slat seeks to both clean up the worst of plastic pollution in oceans, and to stop the flow of plastics from rivers into oceans. In this episode of The Committed Innovator, McKinsey innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Slat about the challenges of starting and evolving The Ocean Cleanup, how the organization has found success, and what it takes to continue the effort. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. You can follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
Erik Roth, McKinsey: Boyan, tell us how you came to start The Ocean Cleanup. What was the inspiration?
Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup: I’ve always been very passionate about technology since I was little. I was always building something with my computer and doing chemistry experiments. When I was 16, I was on a family vacation to Greece and decided to go scuba diving. When I went in the water, I was expecting to see all these beautiful things, but I saw more plastic bags than fish. I was quite shocked and disappointed by that and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I asked myself, “Why can’t we just clean this up?” I did a high-school science project on the topic, but still wanted to better understand the problem and come up with a technology to do just that. I went to university to study aerospace engineering, but I couldn’t let go of the problem of plastic waste in the ocean, so I dropped out about half a year in and started The Ocean Cleanup.
Erik Roth: How does your inspiration for cleaning up the ocean translate in your mind to, “I must do a project about this, and there has to be a way to solve it”?
Boyan Slat: I was just really obsessed with this thing. I always believed there must be some way to do it—we’ve put people on the moon, after all. And we created this problem in the first place, so why wouldn’t we be able to solve it?
Erik Roth: Can you dimensionalize a little bit of the problem you’re referring to? We’ve all seen plastic in the water or on the beach. What is the magnitude of the challenge you’ve taken on?
Boyan Slat: Globally, a few hundred million kilos of plastic enter the oceans every year. And a lot of that washes up pretty quickly after leaving river mouths. That’s how most of the plastic flows into the ocean. The fact that a lot of it washes back up onto land doesn’t mean that it stops being harmful. Coastal areas are very important ecosystems, and they’re also important for tourism. So that plastic is one problem we’re working on.
The other is the small fraction of plastic that does make it all the way to the middle of the ocean. Most people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s three times the size of France and contains more than half of the plastic that’s afloat on the world’s ocean surfaces. That’s just one area where the currents converge like a giant vortex, though. There are others.
Erik Roth: Have you seen it in person?
Boyan Slat: I personally have never been there because I get seasick quite badly. I have to leave the fieldwork to our team members usually. But one of the things you should realize about this patch of floating plastic is that it’s not a solid island. You can’t walk on it. It’s a very dispersed debris field, and that was one of the prime challenges in cleaning it up. We now have a cleanup system that has proven itself and can clean an area of ocean the size of a football field every five seconds. But now the next step is really about being able to steer those cleanup systems to the parts of the garbage patch that have the highest density of plastics to clean up. This stuff is not homogeneously spread, and so identifying the areas with more plastic and steering our systems to them in time is where the bleeding edge of our work is now. We’re using satellite data, drones, and AI-powered cameras to create real-time forecasts of where the highest density of plastic will be and when.
Erik Roth: You described your moment of inspiration as a teenager on a family vacation in Greece. How did you move from identifying this problem in the ocean to where your focus is today, which includes rivers? And what does your organization look like?
Boyan Slat: Today at The Ocean Cleanup we are roughly 200 people, mostly in the Netherlands, but also spread out around the world. And what we do is this two-pronged approach to the problem. On the one hand, we are cleaning up the “legacy pollution” that’s already in the ocean and, in particular, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California. On the other hand, we are working to clean up certain rivers to prevent new plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.
In the first few years of our existence, we invested millions of dollars in fundamental scientific research because we believe you can only solve a problem if you truly understand it. We fully mapped the garbage patch for the first time, which enabled us to develop this method that now allows us to clean it up in just what we expect will be a matter of years. We also studied the sources of ocean plastic and published a global inventory of the rivers where it comes from. That’s how we made a crucial discovery, which is that just 1 percent of the world’s rivers are responsible for about 80 percent of all the plastic that flows into the oceans. When we saw that, we knew we needed to go after that 1 percent of rivers to rapidly stop more plastic from going into the ocean. But that’s still about 1,000 rivers, so it’s not a small task.
Erik Roth: So it’s really a two-pronged solution.
Boyan Slat: Yes. The way we think about it is it’s not an either-or question of whether to clean up plastic upstream or downstream. We have to do both. What’s already in the ocean has to be cleaned up—there’s no law or education program or waste management solution that can prevent what’s already there from being there. But we also need to prevent more plastic from getting into the oceans. That’s where our Interceptor rigs help us. These are solar-powered floating machines that capture and extract plastic trash from rivers. We see Interceptors as a quick fix that gets us to clean oceans very quickly. And that buys the world time to then work on the structural improvements that can reduce plastic waste in the first place. Long-term, we hope the entire world is as clean as Singapore and collects and disposes of all the garbage responsibly. Realistically, because of the cost of all of that, it will take some time. But we do see that deploying these Interceptors raises awareness about the issue in the places we deploy them, which helps put the question high on the agenda. We also are able to provide data to local governments so they know where the biggest problems are and where to focus their efforts.
Erik Roth: How are you cleaning the plastic up? What does the solution you built look like?
Boyan Slat: There are two solutions, one for the legacy pollution that’s already trapped in the ocean and doesn’t go away by itself. And the other is our Interceptors, solar-powered machines that operate in rivers to prevent new plastic from flowing into the ocean in the first place. For the legacy pollution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there are two components. One is the hardware, a two-and-a-half-kilometer-long U-shaped barrier that’s dragged slowly along by two large ships, which acts like a funnel to trap and contain the plastic. Then there is the software side—our method for detecting the highest densities of plastic in the patch—which uses advanced computer modeling to determine where we should deploy the hardware. The modeling uses real-time data we get from satellites and AI-powered cameras we have deployed on merchant vessels that cross this area all the time. We also use long-range drones that we launch from our ships for short-term, high-resolution forecasting. That’s how we then steer the systems to the right locations. With this surgical approach to the areas where the highest concentrations of plastic are, you can speed up the cleanup and reduce the cost by a factor of five. So it’s really worth tackling those highest-density areas to clean up this patch. We could even accomplish the task in as little as five years’ time.
Erik Roth: Other than suffering from seasickness, what roadblocks have you navigated along the way? And what advice would you give others who are considering a similarly audacious objective?
Boyan Slat: Obviously, getting to this point has not been a straight line. We’ve had many “unscheduled learning opportunities,” as we refer to them. I’ll highlight an example. When we launched our first system for cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch back in 2018, we worked a year to build that system and put I think more than $10 million into getting it launched. But when we took it out, it didn’t collect plastic, which as you can imagine is a pretty important requirement for an ocean cleanup system. And later it actually broke in two, which obviously also wasn’t planned. We learned a ton from that. Ultimately we got it to work, but looking back I think what I would’ve done is experimented at a smaller scale and closer to shore, rather than 1,000 miles offshore. When you’re doing something that has never been done before, it’s like trying to find the peak of the highest mountain in a foggy landscape. You’re walking uphill, but you have no idea whether you’re on the right mountain. You’re bound to climb a few wrong mountains before you actually end up on the correct mountain that is actually the highest.
Some of that trial and error is just part of the process of innovation. But the key is to make sure that exploratory process is done in as cheap a way as possible. You want to be able to recover from your mistakes, and you want to waste as little money and time as possible while making those mistakes. Ultimately we got there, but it took a few more years than I hoped it would.
Erik Roth: How did you think about the steps on your journey? Did you create milestones? Was it really intentional or more organic?
Boyan Slat: We think of it as a risk curve that you want to go down as quickly as possible early on. So you’re thinking, “What’s the next thing I can do to maximize risk reduction?” If you’re very uncertain, you want to do very explorative research. We did hundreds of scale-model tests in those early days, with completely different concepts, to converge on a broad direction to head into. Over time we became more intentional and systematic. The tricky thing is when you’ve converged on a certain concept and then you have to abandon that concept later on. That’s what we had to do. After five years of development on a passive concept for collecting ocean trash, we had to pivot to an active approach.
Erik Roth: How do you know when you’ve pushed too far in a certain direction?
Boyan Slat: I think usually when you’re on the right path, you find that the further you go, the simpler things become. But if you’re on the wrong path, things get more complex. This is why we had to pivot to an active system. One of the challenges was keeping the system open. If there isn’t tension on it, the U-shape will just collapse into itself. At one point, our proposals for solving this included a massive, Eiffel Tower–sized steel spreader beam that would sit below the water’s surface to keep it open. That was the point when we really started to wonder: Are we on the right path with this? We were not—and today we use two ships to tow the device, which we ultimately also needed to transport the collected plastic to recycling facilities. So I would say to others that what you want to see is reduction in complexity over time.
Erik Roth: How do you think about the orchestration of this journey? It’s a pretty remarkable feat to coordinate across what I would imagine is a vast ecosystem of partners, participants, and stakeholders.
Boyan Slat: What we’re doing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is relatively straightforward because it’s no man’s land out there. It’s just us versus the laws of nature, and our operating partner that runs the day-to-day. But the river projects are more complex. We have 20 deployed that are already stopping between 2 and 5 percent of global plastic emissions into oceans. But within a few years, we want to increase that to a third of global plastic emissions. That actually is a lot more complicated. There is government permitting, coming up with sustainable cost coverage for operational costs, and identifying operators to run the day-to-day extractions. There are responsible waste management partners to be set up. There are a lot of moving parts involved. It took some learning for us to figure out how to make all that work, so having a model that is as straightforward as possible is critical. We have found that having those running the operations act as a supplier rather than a joint-venture-type collaboration has proven to be the most effective, because no one is going to care more about operating well than we do.
Strategic Growth and Innovation
Erik Roth: Is everyone you interact with supportive? Have you run into resistance?
Boyan Slat: We’ve really never had a situation where people weren’t supportive of what we do. Governments always see the value in terms of the economy and jobs. What does sometimes slow us down is just the complexity of how governments operate. We’ve been in meetings with literally 50 people, which is obviously not the recipe for an effective meeting. Occasionally there are half a dozen local authorities involved, and that does make things complicated at times. But once you have experience in a few places, you can build on that. The first deployment is always the hardest, but after that you can move pretty quickly.
That has also informed the ways our model has evolved. The first 20 rivers we tackled were kind of all over the place. We just thought we were trying to go after the most polluted rivers on Earth. But what we’ve come to learn is that we can scale much more effectively if we do it on a city-by-city basis, because then you’ve got all these scale economies from working with the same governments, operating partner, logistics, and waste management. We can move faster when we tackle all the polluted rivers of a given city, for example. So city-by-city scale-up is the model we pursue now. And that’s why as a next scale-up step we are going to tackle 30 of the most plastic-polluted cities on Earth.
Erik Roth: How do you think about the future of The Ocean Cleanup? Is it more about deploying more systems to catch plastic once it’s been disposed of? Or do you have broader plans to move up the value chain, if you will, to the source, to try to change behavior or how plastic is made, or other avenues for impact?
Boyan Slat: We believe that if we try to do everything, we will succeed at nothing. So we need to have this maniacal focus on the things we have chosen to do. I would love for our Interceptors to be not necessary anymore, for there to be no more trash entering these rivers in the first place. Realistically though, that is going to take time and a lot of money, because of the scale involved. The reason we focus on rivers is that only a very small fraction of all the plastic we use ends up in rivers and flows into the ocean. It’s less than 0.1 percent. But that is a tremendous amount of trash that we are extracting from these rivers. If we were to expand in the manner you mentioned, we would have to deal with 1,000 times that volume to have the same quantity of impact on the ocean. For every plastic bottle you capture with an Interceptor, you would have to properly manage 1,000 bottles upstream in the value chain in order to have the same impact on the ocean. That’s why Interceptors are essentially the fastest and most cost-effective way to stop more plastic from entering the oceans today.
Of course, it is not meant as a replacement for that upstream work. What I hope to see is that as countries get richer, they are able to afford that multitrillion-dollar-a-year bill the world needs to pay to have good waste management infrastructure globally. For example, the city of Jakarta already spends about $80 million a year on waste management, and that would need to go to about half a billion a year to really have proper waste management infrastructure. That’s just going to take time, you know? The budgets are increasing year after year, but realistically it’s going to take decades before no more trash flows through those rivers. In the meantime, we are there to buy the world time, to get to clean oceans as quickly as possible.
Erik Roth: How expensive is it to deploy in a river?
Boyan Slat: Our motto is that we essentially find private funding to secure the initial investment to deploy, and then seek local government funding to take over the long-term operational cost. So to tackle about 80 to 90 percent of global plastic emissions, we believe it will take $1 billion to $2 billion in total—and then maybe $100 million a year or so of continued operation. Global waste management already is $500 billion a year, so half a trillion a year, and it takes a few trillion dollars a year to service the seven billion people who don’t have access to adequate waste management at this moment.
Erik Roth: So if it only costs about $1 billion to deploy, and $100 million annually to maintain, what prevents us from solving this one?
Boyan Slat: In some senses, it’s a no-brainer—the money it would take to solve the problem of plastic in the oceans is a rounding error in other industries. But realistically, I think we have needed to prove that cleaning plastic out of the ocean can be done, and now we are doing that. We’re not the only ones working on this, by the way. Once the world can really see the before and after, and that a clean ocean is possible, we think it will unlock the support that will say, “OK, now we need to copy-paste this around the world.”
Erik Roth: Where do you get your support?
Boyan Slat: It’s both large and small donations, and we need them all. Our current supporters include high-net-worth individuals, and corporates. Kia, the car company, is a big backer. We also have many thousands of individuals who donate through our website.
Erik Roth: What advice do you have for entrepreneurs with goals of tackling a global problem like this?
Boyan Slat: Start with the problem, not the solution. Invest a lot in understanding the problem. We were the first to document where plastic was flowing into the oceans, and to completely map the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Without that research, we wouldn’t have known about the hot spots in the patch and how to tackle that effectively. And we wouldn’t have known that 1 percent of the world’s rivers contribute 80 percent of global plastic emissions, which is the foundation of our strategy. You have to be the world’s authority on the problem in order to solve it. It’s also important to make your ambition large enough. There is a huge difference between reducing a problem and solving a problem. Even though solving a problem is much harder, it’s what is needed and what the market demands.
Lastly, you just have to start. It’s the only way to learn. When I started, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was terrible at my job, to be honest. I didn’t know how to lead a team. I didn’t know how to innovate. But it turns out that this was not a huge disaster. You just have to actually get started and have an extreme sort of intensity and focus. You’re going to have a lot of roadblocks. There are going to be a lot of failures. But the key is what you do with that. How do you respond? As long as the problem is important enough, you really shouldn’t give up. I think most things that fail do so because people give up too early. Be flexible in terms of how you get to success, and very stubborn when it comes to the end goal and succeeding in the mission.
Erik Roth: Before we go, Boyan, how can people get involved with The Ocean Cleanup?
Boyan Slat: We’re always looking for great companies and individuals to contribute—and become part of the mission. We have a lot of videos at TheOceanCleanup.com to help folks learn more.
Erik Roth: Thanks for sharing your journey with us. I applaud the mission and wish you complete success.
Boyan Slat: Thank you so much.
Have questions or topics you would like for us to cover? Please reach out at The_Committed_ Innovator@mckinsey.com
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