This looks like science fiction, but it's real. A 16-year-old builds a robot that eats trash to save the oceans… and it actually starts working. No experience. No connections. Just pure obsession. This is a true story:🧵
@BoyanSlat In 2011, 16-year-old Boyan Slat went diving in Greece. But instead of fish… he saw plastic. That moment broke him. He asked a question no one had seriously asked before: “Why can’t we just clean this up?”
At 18, he dropped out of university. He had €300. No team. No investors. Just an idea to remove 90% of ocean plastic by 2040. Everyone laughed. So he built machines that eat trash.
By 19, he founded The Ocean Cleanup. The problem? 5 trillion pieces of plastic were floating in the ocean. He built his first robot: System 001. It failed. Plastic slipped right through it.
Most people would have quit. Boyan doubled down. By 2018, he launched System 002 (nicknamed Jenny). Jenny worked. She pulled 100,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just months. The machines were finally eating. But he didn’t stop there.
Next came The Interceptor - a robot for rivers. A solar-powered, fully automated catamaran that parks in rivers and eats trash before it reaches the sea. It can collect up to 50,000 kg of waste per day. Because 1,000 rivers are responsible for 80% of all ocean plastic.
System 03 is a monster: • 2.5 km long, 3x larger than Jenny • Can clean a football field of ocean every 5 seconds • Includes a Marine Animal Safety Hatch to protect sea life • Designed to become the blueprint for mass-scale cleanup.
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Today, these trash-eating robots: • Float in the Pacific • Patrol major rivers • Are backed by governments and corporations • And have removed over 250,000 kg of plastic By 2024, The Ocean Cleanup had removed 11.5 million kg of plastic, more than all prior years combined.
The wildest part? Boyan Slat: • Gets seasick • Rarely goes out to sea • Was told he was just a kid • Had 300 companies reject him Now he’s the youngest UN “Champion of the Earth.”
Machines are now cleaning what humans ignored. They don’t sleep. They don’t get tired. They just eat trash, and they’re getting smarter, faster, and more scalable. If machines are doing their part... What about us?
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