Boyan Slat Quotes:
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
What humans aren’t good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.
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
These garbage patches won’t go away by themselves.
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
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
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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
Source: My Modern Met
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
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
We need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.
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 think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time.
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
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
Our main funders… a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.
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
I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean.
Boyan Slat
There’s no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.
Boyan Slat
I am quite obsessive by nature.
Boyan Slat
I think, in reality, opinions don’t matter that much.
Boyan Slat
When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.
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
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
The entire brain of the organization is here. The construction drawings and data processing all takes place in Rotterdam.
Boyan Slat
Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.
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
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
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
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