Boyan Slat Quotes

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.

Our beaches should not be garbage dumps. Our oceans must not be cesspools.

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.

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.

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

Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.

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

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

When I was 16 years old, I went scuba diving in Greece and saw more plastic bags than fish. I wondered why we couldn't just clean it up. That rather simple question stuck in my head.

Truly, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to actually go out there and deploy the world's first ocean-cleaning system.

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.

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.

I guess over the course of time, I started to open up to a lot of the issues surrounding the oceans. From my personal experience, being out in the water and seeing plastics floating around and thinking they are jellyfish and realizing they're plastic bags. I'm always that guy that will take it into the shore.

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

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.

Cut down on your use of plastic shopping bags because many end up in the ocean.

I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation.

The seas need their own Kyoto Protocol.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.

We need to do a better job of keeping oceans healthy.

The very survival of the human species depends upon the maintenance of an ocean clean and alive.... The ocean is our planet's life belt.

On the face of it there is a pristine white sandy beach, but within an hour, around 100 of us can collect up to 250-300 kilos of rubbish. It's mostly bits of plastic, fishing line, nylon, bottle caps. We've found everything.

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.