Quotes from Boyan Slat

You go to a beach, you see a lot of plastic. It's out of the ocean, it stays out of the ocean, so that's good. But the thing is that in this Great Pacific garbage patch, this area twice the size of Texas, there's simply no coastlines to collect plastic. So the idea is to have these very long floating barriers.

To truly rid the oceans of plastic, what we need to do is two things: One, we need to clean up the legacy pollution, the stuff that has been accumulating for decades and doesn't go away by itself. But, two, we need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.

This plastic doesn't go away by itself, and to just let hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic be out there to be fragmented into these small and dangerous microplastics to me seems like an unacceptable scenario.

We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.

The main principle behind the cleanup system is to have a difference in speed between the system and the plastic so that it goes faster than the plastic, and you can collect it.

It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.

I would never be able to work on a photo-sharing app or 'Internet startup XYZ.'

I don't understand why 'obsessive' has a negative connotation, I'm an obsessive and I like it. I get an idea and I stick to it.

I am quite obsessive by nature.

For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.

There are already dozens of organizations working on trying to prevent plastic from going into the ocean, through advocacy, education, awareness, all great work, yet nobody was addressing the stock of existing pollution.

We think the fastest way to clean the ocean is to learn by doing.

Really, the ocean itself - that's really the thing that we're up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.

Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.

I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean.

I've gone on a research expedition in the Atlantic Ocean before. I was sick for the entire week after that.

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

It's nice there is a cleanup system, but if it doesn't collect any plastic, it's not very useful.

I really hate looking back. think it's useless. The only way is forward.

I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.

Coastlines are very effective ways of catching plastic. But the thing is, in those vast ocean garbage patches, there's simply no coastlines to catch any plastic. So we built our own artificial coastline.

I'm a firm believer of the venture capitalist-style approach to solving problems. Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it's much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward.

I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.

What I like best is sitting in a room together with really smart engineers thinking about a problem.