Boyan Slat Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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

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

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.

We've become a plastic society.

I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation 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.

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

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.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.

The plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change.

One of my big pet peeves is single-use plastic bags. I think it's one of the stupidest ideas in the world.

My obsession is plastic packaging. It makes me sick, all the waste. Everything about it disappoints me.

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

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.

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.

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.

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

About once a month, a vessel visits each of these clean-up systems, almost like a garbage truck of the ocean, would bring the plastic back to shore where it would then be processed and recycled into new products that we would then sell, at a premium, of course, because we could sell it as being made out of ocean plastic.

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

If children knew what the effects are of using single-use plastic straws for drinking sodas or whatever, they might reconsider and use paper straws or no straws at all.