Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I get seasick quite badly.
I am not a man of the sea.
Musk is very inspiring to me.
I am quite obsessive by nature.
To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.
We could truly make our oceans clean again.
The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.
We're driving the largest cleanup in history.
You solve a problem then get a new one in return.
These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.
Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.
It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.
By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.
I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.
When you walk, your brain is working better. More blood flow.
Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.
I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.
We think the fastest way to clean the ocean is to learn by doing.
When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.
I really hate looking back. think it's useless. The only way is forward.
I would never be able to work on a photo-sharing app or 'Internet startup XYZ.'
Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.
We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.
I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean.
It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.
It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong.
For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.
What humans aren't good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.
Basically I have a fleet of cleanup systems floating around, up to 50 that we plan on deploying.
It's nice there is a cleanup system, but if it doesn't collect any plastic, it's not very useful.
What I like best is sitting in a room together with really smart engineers thinking about a problem.
We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.
We need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.
There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.
I've gone on a research expedition in the Atlantic Ocean before. I was sick for the entire week after that.
The way the clean-up system works is that we let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.
Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.
Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last. I just wasn't picked at all.
For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.
Really, the ocean itself - that's really the thing that we're up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.
The entire brain of the organization is here. The construction drawings and data processing all takes place in Rotterdam.
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 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.
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.
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 main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.
We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.
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.
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.
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.