Musk is very inspiring to me.

I would never be able to work on a photo-sharing app or 'Internet startup XYZ.'

I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.

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.

The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.

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.'

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

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.'

We're starting with the North Pacific gyre simply because it is the largest accumulation of plastic.

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.

We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.

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.

We're driving the largest cleanup in history.

You solve a problem then get a new one in return.

Rivers are the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea.

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.

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.

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.

Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.

It was a long journey, but it was also a relief to see that first plastic being caught.

We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.

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.

It's never really fun to be in the public spotlight.

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.

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.

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic.

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 important to stay humble.