Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Inventor tries to conquer plastic in the ocean

ALAMEDA, California – A ship on Saturday will begin towing a long plane from Northern California to more than 1,000 kilometers from the sea to start picking up a huge pile of trash estimated at 88,000 tons. It may look like a giant pipeline, but the 2,000-foot-long machine will soon clean up what's called the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" composed of about 1.8 trillion pieces of floating plastic.

"This area is twice the size of Texas, so if you were going through boats and nets it would take about 79,000 years," Boyan Slat said.

The 24-year-old Dutch inventor said his technology could do it much faster. He had the idea when he was just 16 years old.

"I was scuba diving in Greece, I saw more plastic bags than fish and I thought we could not clean everything up," Slat said.

He took CBS News on the water to show how his system of cleaning the oceans was inspired by the beaches covered with waste.

"The ribs are very effective ways to catch the plastic, but the fact is that in these vast plots of garbage, there is simply no coastline to catch the plastic," Slat said. . "So we built our own artificial coast."

Once towed to the garbage bin, the collection system floats freely with the ocean current and forms a "u" to corrode the waste. A skirt about 10 feet deep catches the plastic, and a ship then recovers it to recycle it into products like sunglasses.

In the end, Slat hopes to deploy 60 systems.

"We plan to remove half of the waste from the Pacific area every five years," said Slat.

The experts of the ocean are hopeful.

"It's really an idea that's worth being tested, but if we clean and do not stop plastics at the source, we have an even bigger problem," said Dr. Jerry Schubel, President and CEO of Aquarium of the Pacific.

For now, Slat is focusing on this first comprehensive test. When asked if he was certain it would work, he said no, but added, "This is what we will see in the coming months."