Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Boyan Slat - Page 2

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.

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

It's important to stay humble.

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.'

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

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.'

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.

You solve a problem then get a new one in return.

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.

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

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

The way the clean-up system works is that we let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.

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.

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.

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.

It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.

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.