Nature isn't doomed if we work fast enough.

That's the essential premise fueling The Ocean Cleanup , an organization that hopes to pull an unbelievable amount of plastic waste from the Pacific Ocean in the next decade.

"The story has always been: We can't clean it up, so the best thing we can do is not make it worse," Boyan Slat , Ocean Cleanup founder, told The Huffington Post in a Skype interview. "To me, that's depressing."

That is depressing. Imagine Earth as a stewing mound of sun-baked waste that everyone's standing on, nostrils clenched shut by fingers. Some may do their part to avoid making the mound bigger, but how many are able to make it smaller?

Slat thinks his team can.