Boyan Slat 79 Far Out Quotes

Boyan Slat 79 Far Out Quotese

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

About once a month, a vessel visits each of these clean-up systems, almost like a garbage truck of the ocean, would bring the plastic back to shore where it would then be processed and recycled into new products that we would then sell, at a premium, of course, because we could sell it as being made out of ocean plastic.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

Look at climate change. That's a bigger problem than plastic, but we can't all focus on that and forget about plastic - that isn't how the world works. We can divide our attention across different things, using clean-up to strengthen prevention.

— Boyan Slat

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.

— Boyan Slat

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

— Boyan Slat

There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.

— Boyan Slat

What humans aren't good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

I've always been obsessed with technology.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

There will always be people saying things can't be done. And history shows that time and time again things 'couldn't be done' and they were done.

— Boyan Slat

I am quite obsessive by nature.

— Boyan Slat

Whenever you start working on something, you have to go about it with the underlying assumption that this puzzle has a solution, right? If you started a jigsaw puzzle not knowing whether all the pieces were in the box, it would not be a fun exercise.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

I am not a man of the sea.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

Really, the ocean itself - that's really the thing that we're up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

Coastlines are very effective ways of catching plastic. But the thing is, in those vast ocean garbage patches, there's simply no coastlines to catch any plastic. So we built our own artificial coastline.

— Boyan Slat

I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

We use a curtain, so we don't use a net, so there's nothing sea life can get entangled with. And also, the system moves very slowly. It moves around 4 inches per second on average. So really, the chances of sea life being harmed by this are very minimal.

— Boyan Slat

I get seasick quite badly.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

We think the fastest way to clean the ocean is to learn by doing.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

We need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.

— Boyan Slat

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

— Boyan Slat

I really hate looking back. think it's useless. The only way is forward.

— Boyan Slat

Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.

— Boyan Slat

Musk is very inspiring to me.

— Boyan Slat

I would never be able to work on a photo-sharing app or 'Internet startup XYZ.'

— Boyan Slat

I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.

— Boyan Slat

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.'

— Boyan Slat

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.'

— Boyan Slat

We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

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

— Boyan Slat

We're driving the largest cleanup in history.

— Boyan Slat

Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— 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.

— Boyan Slat

We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

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.

— Boyan Slat

It will be very hard to convince everyone in the world to handle their plastics responsibly, but what we humans are very good in, is inventing technical solutions to our problems.

— Boyan Slat

It's important to stay humble.

— Boyan Slat

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