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

This plastic doesn't go away by itself, and to just let hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic be out there to be fragmented into these small and dangerous microplastics to me seems like an unacceptable scenario.

The entire brain of the organization is here. The construction drawings and data processing all takes place in Rotterdam.

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

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

About once a month, a vessel visits each of these clean-up systems, almost like a garbage truck of the ocean, would bring the plastic back to shore where it would then be processed and recycled into new products that we would then sell, at a premium, of course, because we could sell it as being made out of ocean plastic.

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.

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.

I get seasick quite badly.

We use a curtain, so we don't use a net, so there's nothing sea life can get entangled with. And also, the system moves very slowly. It moves around 4 inches per second on average. So really, the chances of sea life being harmed by this are very minimal.

You go to a beach, you see a lot of plastic. It's out of the ocean, it stays out of the ocean, so that's good. But the thing is that in this Great Pacific garbage patch, this area twice the size of Texas, there's simply no coastlines to collect plastic. So the idea is to have these very long floating barriers.

I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time.

Coastlines are very effective ways of catching plastic. But the thing is, in those vast ocean garbage patches, there's simply no coastlines to catch any plastic. So we built our own artificial coastline.

When you walk, your brain is working better. More blood flow.

Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last. I just wasn't picked at all.

I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean.

Really, the ocean itself - that's really the thing that we're up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.

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

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.

By the time I was 13, I was very interested in rocketry.

It's in my nature that when people say something is impossible I like to prove them wrong.

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.

I don't understand why 'obsessive' has a negative connotation, I'm an obsessive and I like it. I get an idea and I stick to it.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.