For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.
Boyan Slat
I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.
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.
There will always be people saying things can't be done. And history shows that time and time again things 'couldn't be done' and they were done.
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.
When I was 16 years old, I went scuba diving in Greece and saw more plastic bags than fish. I wondered why we couldn't just clean it up. That rather simple question stuck in my head.
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.
It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong.
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.
I envisioned an extremely long network of floating barriers - they're like curtains floating in the ocean which are attached to the seabed. So what happens is that the current comes around and plastic gets pushed towards these barriers. And because it's in a V-shape, the plastic gets push towards the center.
When you look at the humanitarian issues - poverty, education, rights, violence - I think there are positive trends. But when you look at climate change, at plastic pollution and other forms of pollution, at overconsumption, it's a different story.
I am quite obsessive by nature.
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.
The worst is yet to come, because all the plastic that is already out there is going to become more hazardous if we don't clean it up.
Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.
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.
What humans aren't good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.
It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.
We're driving the largest cleanup in history.
You need a group of people who will continually realize that you will run into problems, and for each you will have hundreds or thousands of ways you can approach it.
Everyone said to me: 'Oh there's nothing you can do about plastic once it gets into the oceans,' and I wondered whether that was true.
By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.
To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.
I am not a man of the sea.
Our main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.
Look at climate change. That's a bigger problem than plastic, but we can't all focus on that and forget about plastic - that isn't how the world works. We can divide our attention across different things, using clean-up to strengthen prevention.
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.
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 North Sea can be a pretty violent place.
It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.
We think the fastest way to clean the ocean is to learn by doing.
I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time.
Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.
I've gone on a research expedition in the Atlantic Ocean before. I was sick for the entire week after that.
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.
For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.
We could truly make our oceans clean again.
We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.
I think very often problems are so big, people approach problems from the bottom up: 'If only I do this little bit, then hopefully there will be some sort of snowball effect that will be bigger and bigger.' I'm much more in favor of the top-down approach to problem-solving.
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.'
Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last. I just wasn't picked at all.
When you walk, your brain is working better. More blood flow.
We use a curtain, so we don't use a net, so there's nothing sea life can get entangled with. And also, the system moves very slowly. It moves around 4 inches per second on average. So really, the chances of sea life being harmed by this are very minimal.
Can we build a system which is able to survive on the ocean for years? That is the key question we are trying to answer here with the North Sea prototype.
The winning concept is the slow-down approach, in which we use a parachute anchor to slow down the system as much as possible, allowing the natural winds and waves to push the plastic into the system.
Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.
I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.
It will be very hard to convince everyone in the world to handle their plastics responsibly, but what we humans are very good in, is inventing technical solutions to our problems.
We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.
