I am quite obsessive by nature.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
You solve a problem then get a new one in return.
I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.
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.
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.
We're driving the largest cleanup in history.
Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.
The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.
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.
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.'
I've gone on a research expedition in the Atlantic Ocean before. I was sick for the entire week after that.
We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.
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.
Basically I have a fleet of cleanup systems floating around, up to 50 that we plan on deploying.
The way the clean-up system works is that we let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.
