A biography for Boyan Slathasn’t been written yet.
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I would never be able to work on a photo-sharing app or 'Internet startup XYZ.'”
“When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.”
“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.”
“Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.”
“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.”
“I think, in reality, opinions don't matter that much.”
“Musk is very inspiring to me.”
“When you walk, your brain is working better. More blood flow.”
“Really, the ocean itself - that's really the thing that we're up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Our main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.”
“Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.”
“Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.”
“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 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.'”