Businessman

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I've always been obsessed with technology.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.