Boyan Slat Quotes

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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

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.

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.

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

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.

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

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

The facts are clear. Our oceans are a mess.

When I learned about this tragedy that's happening in Midway - you know, these birds whose stomachs are filled with handfuls of our waste - I just felt drawn there magnetically.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The oceans are more or less in disrepair. Long Beach really is making an effort to acknowledge this, and that's a great place to start. I'm trying to spread at least the knowledge that it's never too early to take care of our oceans and our environment.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.

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

There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet - as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean.

I moved into this neighborhood, and I was walking on this beach with my kids, and we came across a sign that said, 'Water's polluted, no swimming.' And I didn't have any answers.

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart.

There are a number of things everyone can do to help protect whales.