There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.
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.
For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.
I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.
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.
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.
For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.
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.
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.
It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong.
These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.
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.
We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.
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.
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.
When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.
It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.
Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.
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.
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.
