A Quote by Boyan Slat

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

Boyan Slat

Quote Topics

Ocean Plastic Pollution

Quote Author

Boyan Slat
Dutch - Businessman
Born: July 27, 1994

I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.

Helen Mirren

Plastic debris in the ocean was thought to accumulate in big patches, mostly in subtropical gyres - big currents that converge in the middle of the ocean - but scientists estimate that only about 1 percent of plastic pollution is in these gyres and other surface waters in the open ocean.

Tatiana Schlossberg

Ocean plastic in particular has captured the public imagination, and seems to be a jumping-off point for several companies developing plastic alternatives, both in source material and in the pollution they are trying to prevent.

Tatiana Schlossberg

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.

Boyan Slat

Thanks to David Attenborough and 'Blue Planet 2,' we've become aware of the damage to our oceans from plastic pollution. We now know to use textile shopping bags instead of plastic, reuse coffee-cups and refuse polystyrene ones, and avoid plastic straws when ordering a drink at the bar.

Barry Gardiner

We have lots of other problems with plastic in our oceans. There are five different big gyres of plastic out in the ocean. There are problems with air pollution around the country that we need to deal with, and around the world. We have a great many problems to overcome, so I work on a lot of different boards trying to help in those important areas.

Ed Begley, Jr.

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.

David Suzuki

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.

Boyan Slat

There is less plastic in Tupperware factory than our film industry. People with plastic smile and plastic heart.

Vivek Oberoi

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.

Boyan Slat

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.

Boyan Slat

Honestly, depending on what stage I'm at in my life, my opinion on plastic surgery changes. I've never been against plastic surgery - I'm against bad plastic surgery. I'm against the overuse of plastic surgery.

Michelle Pfeiffer

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.

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.

Boyan Slat

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.

Boyan Slat

I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.