Business Daily Meets: Boyan Slat
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you clean the world's oceans of plastic? 10 years ago, when he was just 18, Dutchman Boyan Slat thought he knew how to do it, and set out his vision at TED talk.
The journey from theory to reality has proved difficult, but he is now extracting plastic from the Pacific and a number of rivers around the world. We speak to Boyan about the scale of the task at hand. Is it even an achievable goal? How is he raising enough money? What does he make of the accusation he’s helping multi-nationals ‘greenwash’ their reputations by taking sponsorship cash?
Presenter/producer: James Graham Image: Boyan Slat on a plastic-strewn beach in Honduras (Credit: The Ocean Cleanup)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My Indian Life is back for season three, the podcast that explores what it means to be young and Indian in the 21st century. |
| 0:07.2 | With guests from all walks of life. |
| 0:09.2 | Singing is a part of storytelling for me. I need to tell my story to the world. |
| 0:12.8 | And from all across this huge country. |
| 0:15.1 | So as a tribe, we are not mere part of nature, but we are nature. Each for the story to tell. |
| 0:21.4 | Winning the gold medal in Paralympics was a dream. That's Kalki presents My Indian Life |
| 0:25.9 | from the BBC World Service. Just search for my Indian life wherever you found this podcast. |
| 0:31.5 | Hello, I'm James Graham. Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. As the United |
| 0:37.1 | Nations annual climate summit continues in Egypt, |
| 0:40.3 | we're looking at another huge environmental challenge, |
| 0:43.3 | the problem of ocean plastic, |
| 0:45.4 | and one man's attempt to clean it up. |
| 0:47.9 | Once there was a stone age, a bronze age, |
| 0:51.5 | and now we are in the middle of the plastic age. |
| 0:55.7 | Boyan Slat runs the Dutch non-profit ocean cleanup, |
| 0:58.9 | which says it wants to put itself out of business by ridding the world's oceans of plastic. |
| 1:03.5 | But it's a tall order. Is that even achievable, |
| 1:06.6 | especially as plastic use is forecast to grow? |
| 1:09.0 | We're going to need, in the order of billions, |
| 1:12.4 | over the next 10 years or so, |
| 1:15.4 | to really do the full job. |
| 1:25.0 | This is the sound of ocean cleanup at work. Two ships slowly pull a long series of floats |
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