- Company
- The Ocean Cleanup
- Role
- Founder & CEO
- Est. Net Worth
- $5 Million (Est.)
- Stage
- Emerging
- Industry
- Tech & SaaS
Boyan Slat
Founder & CEO at The Ocean Cleanup
About
Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup at age 18 after a diving trip in Greece revealed more plastic bags than fish in the Mediterranean. The Dutch inventor and entrepreneur has built the world's largest ocean plastic removal operation, deploying systems in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and intercepting plastic in rivers across Asia and Latin America.
Current Company
The Ocean Cleanup — Founder & CEO
The Teenager Who Took On Ocean Plastic
Boyan Slat was 16 years old when a diving trip in Greece changed his life — he saw more plastic bags underwater than fish. Two years later, in 2013, he dropped out of his aerospace engineering program at TU Delft to found The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit engineering organization dedicated to developing technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. His TEDx talk outlining a passive collection system that would use ocean currents to concentrate plastic went viral, and a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign raised over $2 million to fund the initial research.
What followed was a decade of engineering iteration, failure, and eventually success. The Ocean Cleanup's first open-ocean system broke apart in the Pacific. Boyan Slat rebuilt it. The second version underperformed. He redesigned it again. By 2023, the organization's System 03 was successfully extracting thousands of kilograms of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on every pass — proof that the concept Slat had proposed as a teenager actually worked at scale.
Cleaning Rivers Before They Reach the Sea
Boyan Slat's most scalable innovation may not be the open-ocean systems but the Interceptor — an autonomous, solar-powered barge that captures plastic in rivers before it reaches the ocean. Since roughly 80% of ocean plastic enters through rivers, the Interceptor targets the problem at its source. The Ocean Cleanup has deployed Interceptors in rivers across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and other countries, and plans to address the 1,000 most polluting rivers globally.
As Founder and CEO, Boyan Slat has built The Ocean Cleanup into an organization with over 100 engineers and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and corporate partnerships. At 30, he has already proven that a problem the world had accepted as unsolvable — ocean plastic pollution — can be engineered away. Slat's approach is a blueprint for a new kind of founder: one who treats global environmental crises as engineering challenges and refuses to accept the premise that they can't be fixed.