There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.

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 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.

I've always been obsessed with technology.

I'm a firm believer of the venture capitalist-style approach to solving problems. Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it's much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward.

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.

What humans aren't good at is trying to consume less, to consume less plastic, to not be lazy.

I am quite obsessive by nature.

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.

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.

I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.

I am not a man of the sea.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I get seasick quite badly.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

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

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

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.

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

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

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