BOYAN SLAT

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.

I think, in reality, opinions don't matter that much.

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.

By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.

It's important to stay humble.

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.

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.

The legacy, the waste, is mostly in international waters that are sort of in no man's land and thus considered to be no one nation's problem.

When you look at the humanitarian issues - poverty, education, rights, violence - I think there are positive trends. But when you look at climate change, at plastic pollution and other forms of pollution, at overconsumption, it's a different story.

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

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.

Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last. I just wasn't picked at all.

I think very often problems are so big, people approach problems from the bottom up: 'If only I do this little bit, then hopefully there will be some sort of snowball effect that will be bigger and bigger.' I'm much more in favor of the top-down approach to problem-solving.

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.

Musk is very inspiring to me.

The main principle behind the cleanup system is to have a difference in speed between the system and the plastic so that it goes faster than the plastic, and you can collect it.

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.

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.

I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean.

When you walk, your brain is working better. More blood flow.

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

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.

Our main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.

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.