Boyan Slat

“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.”

“It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.”

“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.”

“I've gone on a research expedition in the Atlantic Ocean before. I was sick for the entire week after that.”

“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.”

“To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.”

“For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.”

“I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“What I like best is sitting in a room together with really smart engineers thinking about a problem.”

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

“It's nice there is a cleanup system, but if it doesn't collect any plastic, it's not very useful.”

“For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.”

“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.”

“The entire brain of the organization is here. The construction drawings and data processing all takes place in Rotterdam.”