Boyan Slat Quotes

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.

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

I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.

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

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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

The film industry needs to confront the physical footprint of the way films get made.

Catalysts offer the promise of making chemical transformations far less polluting.

We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open.

One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways.

In today's world, it is no longer unimaginable to think that business can operate - and even thrive - in an environmentally-friendly manner.

The other exception where we did not at all restore the place to its original condition is the Surrounded Islands. Before we installed our fabric, we had our workers remove 42 tons of garbage off the beaches of those islands. We never brought the garbage back.

As a group, we want to follow good and green strategy. Setting targets is one element of that. The second part is to design products which meet environmental goals.

Right now, we're trying to make sure that what we produce is as good for the environment as possible or, at least, helps clean up another problem.

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.

It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

I just think we need to find a way, because we don't dispose of them very well; they have very bad chemicals in them. If we could just find a way, maybe start at a small step with eliminating batteries perhaps in small electronic devices, and then possibly in the future go bigger, that would be great.

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 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.

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