Ocean Cleanup Quotes

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

About once a month, a vessel visits each of these clean-up systems, almost like a garbage truck of the ocean, would bring the plastic back to shore where it would then be processed and recycled into new products that we would then sell, at a premium, of course, because we could sell it as being made out of ocean plastic.

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.'

Basically I have a fleet of cleanup systems floating around, up to 50 that we plan on deploying.

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.

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

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

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.

A real challenge that I've had with my company, Bayou With Love, is getting people to understand that using post-consumer materials does not mean that you are getting a "less than" product than one made with virgin materials. I use a lot of post-consumer plastic in Bayou's clothing. I use it in our bags, which are made from recycled plastics from the ocean.

The winning concept is the slow-down approach, in which we use a parachute anchor to slow down the system as much as possible, allowing the natural winds and waves to push the plastic into the system.

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 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.

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

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.

We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.

I envisioned an extremely long network of floating barriers - they're like curtains floating in the ocean which are attached to the seabed. So what happens is that the current comes around and plastic gets pushed towards these barriers. And because it's in a V-shape, the plastic gets push towards the center.

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.