In 2011, aged 16, Slat came across more plastic than fish while diving in Greece. He decided to devote a high school project for deeper investigation into ocean plastic pollution and why it was considered impossible to clean up. He later came up with the idea to build a passive system, using the circulating ocean currents to his advantage, which he presented at a TEDx talk in Delft in 2012. Slat discontinued his aerospace engineering studies at TU Delft to devote his time to developing his idea. He founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, and shortly after, his TEDx talk went viral after being shared on several news sites. "Technology is the most potent agent of change. It is an amplifier of our human capabilities", Slat wrote in The Economist. "Whereas other change-agents rely on reshuffling the existing building blocks of society, technological innovation creates entirely new ones, expanding our problem-solving toolbox."
In 2013 Slat founded the non-profit entity The Ocean Cleanup, of which he is now the CEO. The group's mission is to develop advanced technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic. It raised US$2.2million through a crowd funding campaign with the help of 38,000 donors from 160 countries. In June 2014, the Ocean Cleanup published a 528-page feasibility study about the project's potential. Oceanographers Kim Martini and Miriam Goldstein declared the concept unfeasible in a technical critique of the feasibility study on the Deep Sea News website, which was cited by other publications, including Popular Science and The Guardian. The Guardian reported that, as of March 2016, the Ocean Cleanup was continuing to test and refine the concept. Since the Ocean Cleanup started, the organization has raised $31.5million in donations from entrepreneurs in Europe and in Silicon Valley, including Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.
Cleanup systems
Dubbed Systems 001 and 002, the first and second systems encountered various technical failures, with System 001 suffering structural stress damage and breaking in two at one point. However, in 2019, System 001/B, which was a redesign of System 001, successfully collected 60 bags of garbage.
At an unveiling of a new cleanup system dubbed The Interceptor, Slat cited that research from the company showed that 1,000 of the world's most polluted rivers were responsible for roughly 80% of the world's plastic pollution. In an effort to "close the tap" and drastically reduce the amount of plastic entering the world's oceans, The Ocean Cleanup had devised a barge-like system that was completely solar powered and was aimed to be a scalable solution that could be deployed around the world's rivers. As of mid 2020, Interceptors have been deployed in Indonesia and Malaysia, and are prepared to be deployed in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.
Forbes included Slat in their 2016 "30 under 30" list In 2016.
He was selected for a Thiel Fellowship, a program started in 2011 by venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It gives $100,000 to entrepreneurs 22 years old and younger who have left or postponed college to work on their start-up.
In February 2017, Reader's Digest appointed Slat European of the Year, and the Dutch magazine Elsevier awarded him Nederlander van het Jaar 2017.
