Coastal Cleanup Quotes

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.

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

And tar is washing up onto the beaches - big globs of tar. And people are saying, 'Is that going to ruin our summer at the beach?' No, of course not. You take the big blobs of tar and you use them to hold down your blanket.

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.

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 think the fastest way to clean the ocean is to learn by doing.

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

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.

I guess over the course of time, I started to open up to a lot of the issues surrounding the oceans. From my personal experience, being out in the water and seeing plastics floating around and thinking they are jellyfish and realizing they're plastic bags. I'm always that guy that will take it into the shore.

We must make sure that when someone sees the Blue Flag, she or he can say, 'I am protected.'

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.