Boyan Slat Quotes

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.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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

On my second swim at Deception Island, the water was very clear and I was looking at hundreds of whale bones beneath me. It was a graveyard from the whaling some time in the 1920s-30s.

The seas need their own Kyoto Protocol.

There are so many issues in our oceans - like the near extinction of blue fin tuna - that should be taken more seriously worldwide.

The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon. Indiscriminate commercial fishing practices that include miles of driftnets, long lines with thousands of lethal hooks and bottom trawls are ruining ocean ecosystems by killing non-seafood species, including sea turtles and marine mammals.

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

The facts are clear. Our oceans are a mess.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

A healthy ocean is not a luxury item. It is a necessity for survival. And taking care of the ocean means taking care of ourselves.

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 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.

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.

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.

Integrated coastal zone management procedures involving concurrent attention to both the landward and seaward site of the ocean and to coastal forestry and agro-forestry as well as capture and culture fisheries are urgently needed.

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.'