Quotes from Boyan Slat

I am not a man of the sea.

About once a month, a vessel visits each of these clean-up systems, almost like a garbage truck of the ocean, would bring the plastic back to shore where it would then be processed and recycled into new products that we would then sell, at a premium, of course, because we could sell it as being made out of ocean plastic.

I get seasick quite badly.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.

Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last. I just wasn't picked at all.

By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

The legacy, the waste, is mostly in international waters that are sort of in no man's land and thus considered to be no one nation's problem.

Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.

When I started there was this consensus that you could never clean this up, that the problem is way too big, the ocean is way too rough, the issue of bycatch - 'plastic is too big, plastic is too small.'

We absolutely need to clean up the plastic that's already in the ocean. It won't go away by itself. But we do also need to make sure that no more plastic enters the oceans in the first place. These things should go hand in hand.

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.

It's a very strange experience to be four or five days from the closest point of land, and you see more plastic than life.

For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.

The way the clean-up system works is that we let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.

What humans aren't good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.

Truly, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to actually go out there and deploy the world's first ocean-cleaning system.

We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

Basically I have a fleet of cleanup systems floating around, up to 50 that we plan on deploying.

We need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.

The concentration of plastic is rapidly increasing in the gyres. Even if you were to close off the tap, and no more plastic entered the ocean, that plastic would stay there, probably for hundreds of years.

Whenever you start working on something, you have to go about it with the underlying assumption that this puzzle has a solution, right? If you started a jigsaw puzzle not knowing whether all the pieces were in the box, it would not be a fun exercise.