A Dutch non-profit is floating a 600-meter long boom from San Francisco into the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to clean up one of the worst collections of garbage on the planet.

"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" was created by mankind using the world's oceans as refuse collectors, gathered into an area twice the size of Texas by the Ocean's currents called "gyres".  The wrongly discarded plastic waste floats, sometimes mistaken for food by wildlife and choking off the Ocean's natural systems.

The Ocean Cleanup is an organization founded by 24-year old innovator Boyan Slat from the Netherlands.  His concept of a floating boom that combs garbage out of the sea has only been tested in computer simulations.

"I'm the first to acknowledge this has never done before and that it is important to collect plastic on land and close the taps on plastic entering into the ocean, but I also think humanity can do more than one thing at a time to tackle this problem," said Mr. Slat.  "The plastic is really persistent and it doesn't go away by itself and the time to act is now."

The buoyant, U-shaped barrier made of plastic and with a tapered three-meter submerged screen is designed to trap some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in that gyre, while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.  So will a great deal of plastic wate.  It's outfitted with cameras and sensors, as well as communication gear to report its global position at all times.  That will allow a support vessel to come out and collect recovered plastic every few months and transport it to dry land where it might be recycled.

The group has raised US$35 Million to deploy 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020.  "One of our goals is to remove 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years," Slat said. 

There are those who doubt the plan, mainly because there is moreplastic waste being dumped into the ocean every year than can be removed by the boom.

"We at the Ocean Conservancy are highly skeptical but we hope it works," George Leonard, chief scientist of the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.  "The ocean needs all the help it can get."

Dr. Leonard maintains that plastic has to be stopped on land, before it is dumped into the ocean.

"He has set a very large and lofty goal and we certainly hope it works but we really are not going to know until it is deployed," Leonard said.  "We have to wait and see."