There is this notion that is quite popular in the environmental scene that every little bit helps, or 'Think global, act local.' I disagree with that. I think you have to start with how big the solution needs to be to solve the problem and then reason backward from there.
— Boyan Slat
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.
When you walk, your brain is working better. More blood flow.
I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean.
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.
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.
I am not a man of the sea.
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.
There will always be people saying things can't be done. And history shows that time and time again things 'couldn't be done' and they were done.
I've always been obsessed with technology.
I get seasick quite badly.
I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time.
Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last. I just wasn't picked at all.
Really, the ocean itself - that's really the thing that we're up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.
By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.
I don't understand why 'obsessive' has a negative connotation, I'm an obsessive and I like it. I get an idea and I stick to it.
I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.
I am quite obsessive by nature.
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.
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.
We use a curtain, so we don't use a net, so there's nothing sea life can get entangled with. And also, the system moves very slowly. It moves around 4 inches per second on average. So really, the chances of sea life being harmed by this are very minimal.
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.
There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.
I think, in reality, opinions don't matter that much.
It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong.
These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.
Look at climate change. That's a bigger problem than plastic, but we can't all focus on that and forget about plastic - that isn't how the world works. We can divide our attention across different things, using clean-up to strengthen prevention.
What humans aren't good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.
I'm a firm believer of the venture capitalist-style approach to solving problems. Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it's much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward.
