Boyan Slat Quotes

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

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

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

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.

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.

Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.

I watched a documentary called 'Plastic Oceans' on Netflix, and it was an eye-opener for me.

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

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.

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.

We've become a plastic society.

Plastic bags are bad and for the most part unnecessary.

The cheap and easy days of waste disposal are over.

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.

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

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.

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 ocean is tired. It's throwing back at us what we're throwing in there.

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.

It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.

We live in a disposable society. We throw so much away. But it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the planet and it comes from future generations' lives.

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