Brandon Boyd Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

The concentration of plastic is rapidly increasing in the gyres. Even if you were to close off the tap, and no more plastic entered the ocean, that plastic would stay there, probably for hundreds of years.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

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

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