Ocean Debris 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.

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.

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.

Often, a seemingly clear clean beach has a huge amount of hidden litter.

There was a summer in college where I worked for a stretch picking up garbage at the beach. On the early shift, it was very meditative walking the shoreline and crisscrossing the sand, picking up the junk people had dropped or tossed or that the ocean had returned. And there was this strange fantasy element to it.

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.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

I'm obsessed with plastic. I like the syntheticness.

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.