79 Quotes by Boyan Slat

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.

The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.

When you look at the humanitarian issues - poverty, education, rights, violence - I think there are positive trends. But when you look at climate change, at plastic pollution and other forms of pollution, at overconsumption, it's a different story.

Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.

The way you advance a technological society is to try things - to be controversial and contrarian in your thinking in order to get to something that eventually people say, 'I told you it was a great idea.'

Whenever you start working on something, you have to go about it with the underlying assumption that this puzzle has a solution, right? If you started a jigsaw puzzle not knowing whether all the pieces were in the box, it would not be a fun exercise.

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.'

It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.

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