A young Dutch inventor is about to take on one of the biggest clean-up jobs ever attempted on planet Earth.
At just 18 years old he set up a foundation to try and get rid of plastic garbage in our oceans.
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His giant rubbish collector will be towed out into the Pacific to start scooping up an island of floating trash twice the size of the US state of Texas. It looks like a giant pipeline, but the 610-metre-long contraption will soon be cleaning up what's known as the Great Pacific garbage patch, made up of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of floating plastic.
If you were to skim the patch with boats and nets, it would take around 79,000 years to clean up.
Twenty-four-year-old Dutch inventor Boyan Slat says his technology can do it much faster. He came up with the idea when he was just 16.
"I was scuba diving in Greece. I saw more plastic bags than fish and I thought, 'Why we can't just clean this up?'"
Mr Slat took us out on the water to show us how his ocean clean-up system was inspired by rubbish-covered beaches.
"Coastlines are very effective ways of catching plastic, but the thing is in those vast ocean rubbish patches there are simply no coastlines to catch any plastic."
So Mr Slat built his own artificial coastline.
Once it's towed to the garbage patch, the collection system floats freely with ocean current and forms a U-shape to corral the rubbish.
A skirt, about three-metres deep will catch the plastic, and a ship will then collect it for recycling into products.
Ultimately Mr Slat hopes to deploy 60 of these systems.
"Once we have the whole fleet out there, we expect to remove half of the area of the Pacific garbage patch every five years."
Ocean experts are hopeful too.
"I think it's very much an idea worth testing, but if we clean that up and don't stop the plastics at the source, we have an even bigger problem," Dr Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific, says.
For now, Mr Slat is focused on this first, full-scale test. He isn't sure it will work, but is excited to see what develops in the coming months.
CBS News / Newshub.
