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

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.'

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

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.'

The North Sea can be a pretty violent place.

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.

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

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

Musk is very inspiring to me.

Planning is extremely important, but at some point you have to go out and do it.

For society to progress, we should not only move forward but also clean up after ourselves.

I really hate looking back. think it's useless. The only way is forward.

The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

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

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

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

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

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.

For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.

The main principle behind the cleanup system is to have a difference in speed between the system and the plastic so that it goes faster than the plastic, and you can collect it.

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.

Can we build a system which is able to survive on the ocean for years? That is the key question we are trying to answer here with the North Sea prototype.