CARL SMITH REPORTING: For years, plastic has been slowly choking our oceans. Each day around three and a half million pieces of plastic wash into the sea. Once there, they can harm marine animals that mistake plastic for food or get tangled in it. But where is all that plastic coming from?
CARL: Well it often starts here. We've all seen it caught on plants or blowing down the street and occasionally we've accidentally dropped it ourselves.
This plastic rarely just stays on the street though. Instead it often gets washed into waterways.
CARL: Some plastic does get filtered out in drains like these before it gets into our rivers or waterways.
But the rest of it keeps floating. And because plastic can take hundreds of years to break down you might be surprised at just how far it can travel.
CARL: In year or two a bit of rubbish like this here in Adelaide could wash all the way to New Zealand.
After that much time in the water it could start to break down and eventually turn into this: tiny little specs called micro-plastics that animals can mistake for food.
And that isn't the end of this plastic's journey either. Its next stop is the largest dump in the world.
This is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a giant part of the Pacific Ocean bigger than New South Wales filled with floating plastic. We know this patch is a big problem but cleaning it up has been either too tricky or too expensive.
That was until this guy came along. At just 16 years old Boyan Slat from the Netherlands started thinking up a solution.
Boyan Slat: I realised, back in High School, there might be an alternative.
For a school project he designed a system of floating barriers that would be up to 100 kilometres long. They would sit in the path of ocean currents, in a v-shape, to capture and funnel any floating plastic. Then these giant towers would suck it all up.
Boyan Slat: Instead of going after the plastic, you could simply wait for the plastic to come to you!
Five years after coming up with the idea, his organisation the Ocean Clean-up is getting ready for a big trial of the technology off the coast of Japan.
Boyan Slat: yes, it works!
But even if they can grab all that plastic floating on the surface he says his organisation still couldn't fix the problem completely.
Boyan Slat: It is of course essential to first close the tap, to prevent any more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place
So he's calling on everyone to lend a hand.
CARL: Just a single bit of plastic like this can break up into lots of little parts that hang around for ages and cause a lot of damage.
So the best thing you can do is just throw it in the bin!
And who knows how many lives you might save with that one simple act.
