Boyan Slat Quotes

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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

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.

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.

Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

The seas need their own Kyoto Protocol.