It's important to stay humble.
— Boyan Slat
The legacy, the waste, is mostly in international waters that are sort of in no man's land and thus considered to be no one nation's problem.
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.
Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.
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.
We're driving the largest cleanup in history.
We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.
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.'
The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.
I would never be able to work on a photo-sharing app or 'Internet startup XYZ.'
For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.
We could truly make our oceans clean again.
Our main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.
For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.
Can we build a system which is able to survive on the ocean for years? That is the key question we are trying to answer here with the North Sea prototype.
The entire brain of the organization is here. The construction drawings and data processing all takes place in Rotterdam.
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.
It will be very hard to convince everyone in the world to handle their plastics responsibly, but what we humans are very good in, is inventing technical solutions to our problems.
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.
We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.
You need a group of people who will continually realize that you will run into problems, and for each you will have hundreds or thousands of ways you can approach it.
Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.
The way the clean-up system works is that we let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.
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 ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.
I think very often problems are so big, people approach problems from the bottom up: 'If only I do this little bit, then hopefully there will be some sort of snowball effect that will be bigger and bigger.' I'm much more in favor of the top-down approach to problem-solving.
Musk is very inspiring to me.
I really hate looking back. think it's useless. The only way is forward.
We need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.
We think the fastest way to clean the ocean is to learn by doing.
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.
What I like best is sitting in a room together with really smart engineers thinking about a problem.
I've gone on a research expedition in the Atlantic Ocean before. I was sick for the entire week after that.
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.
To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.
It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.
It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.
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.
You solve a problem then get a new one in return.
Basically I have a fleet of cleanup systems floating around, up to 50 that we plan on deploying.
We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.
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.'
I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.
Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.
The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.
Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.
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.
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.
This plastic doesn't go away by itself, and to just let hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic be out there to be fragmented into these small and dangerous microplastics to me seems like an unacceptable scenario.
It's nice there is a cleanup system, but if it doesn't collect any plastic, it's not very useful.
