Boyan Slat Quotes

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.

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

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

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 might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.

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.

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.

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 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.'

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

Cut down on your use of plastic shopping bags because many end up in the ocean.

Our beaches should not be garbage dumps. Our oceans must not be cesspools.

On the face of it there is a pristine white sandy beach, but within an hour, around 100 of us can collect up to 250-300 kilos of rubbish. It's mostly bits of plastic, fishing line, nylon, bottle caps. We've found everything.

Thanks to David Attenborough and 'Blue Planet 2,' we've become aware of the damage to our oceans from plastic pollution. We now know to use textile shopping bags instead of plastic, reuse coffee-cups and refuse polystyrene ones, and avoid plastic straws when ordering a drink at the bar.

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.

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.

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

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

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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

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

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.

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

I guess over the course of time, I started to open up to a lot of the issues surrounding the oceans. From my personal experience, being out in the water and seeing plastics floating around and thinking they are jellyfish and realizing they're plastic bags. I'm always that guy that will take it into the shore.

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