On Saturday a team led by 24-year-old Boyan Slat will haul a 600-meter boom system from San Francisco out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to clean up marine plastic. The launch of this much-anticipated project from his organization, the Ocean Cleanup, marks the culmination of five years of research — surveying, prototyping, testing, redesigning and more testing — not to mention $31.5 million in funding.

“Hopefully in the next few months, we will be able to prove that it works by taking the first plastic out of the ocean to land. And of course, that will be a very historic moment,” says Slat, who dreamed up the project when he was 18.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which covers more than 600,000 square miles between California and Hawaii, contains roughly a third of the plastic debris floating in the oceans. It’s one of the world’s five major ocean gyres — huge regions where circular currents gather trash.

Continue reading at HuffPost. Originally published on September 8, 2018.