A lot of buzz has been generated surrounding a TED talk given by a Dutch teenager. 19 Year old Boyan Slat is spearheading an initiative which aims to clean the world’s oceans in an efficient way. His concept involves using booms and processing facilities to collect plastic while allowing fish and plankton to pass freely.

The prospective project could potentially collect as much as 16 billion lbs of plastic from each ocean gyre over a period of 5 years. The plastic could then be sold and re-used according to the projects website.

His TED Talk:

In 1600 BC, Mesoamericans used natural rubber for balls, bands, and figurines.[11] Early plastics were bio-derived materials such as egg and blood proteins, which are organic polymers. Treated cattle horns were used as windows for lanterns in the Middle Ages. Materials that mimicked the properties of horns were developed by treating milk-proteins (casein) with lye. In the 1800s, the development of plastics accelerated with Charles Goodyear's discovery of vulcanization as a route to thermoset materials derived from natural rubber. Many storied materials were reported as industrial chemistry was developed in the 1800s. In the early 1900s, Bakelite, the first fully synthetic thermoset was reported by Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland. In 1933, polyethylene was discovered by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) researchers Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett.[11] After the First World War, improvements in chemical technology led to an explosion in new forms of plastics; mass production began around the 1940s and 1950s.[12] Polypropylene was found in 1954 by Giulio Natta and began to be manufactured in 1957.[11] Among the earliest examples in the wave of new polymers were polystyrene (PS), first produced by BASF in the 1930s,[11] and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), first created in 1872 but commercially produced in the late 1920s.[11] In 1954, expanded polystyrene (used for building insulation, packaging, and cups) was invented by Dow Chemical.[11] Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)'s discovery is credited to employees of the Calico Printers' Association in the UK in 1941; it was licensed to DuPont for the USA and ICI otherwise, and as one of the few plastics appropriate as a replacement for glass in many circumstances, resulting in widespread use for bottles in Europe.[11] The development of plastics has come from the use of natural plastic materials (e.g., chewing gum, shellac) to the use of chemically modified natural materials (e.g., rubber, nitrocellulose, collagen, galalite) and finally to completely synthetic molecules (e.g., bakelite, epoxy, Polyvinyl chloride).