Boyan Slat Quotes

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

Basically I have a fleet of cleanup systems floating around, up to 50 that we plan on deploying.

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

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.

I would just like my children to be able to eat fish when they grow up. Now, I don't think there's anything controversial about that.

There are so many issues in our oceans - like the near extinction of blue fin tuna - that should be taken more seriously worldwide.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.

I don't eat fish because there is no such thing as sustainable fishing in the world right now.

I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.

Plastic waste is now found in the most remote areas of the planet. It kills marine life and is doing major harm to communities that depend on fishing and tourism.

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

I try desperately to never drink bottled water.