JK: Could you tell us about
the school project that started
it all?
Boyan: I went diving on holiday
to Greece (in summer 2011) and
I suddenly realised I saw more
plastic bags than fish! That was
the first time I found out about
the plastic pollution problem. I
returned to the Netherlands and
started working on it for my
school project. It was
supposed to take
about 80 hours
and I ended
up
spending
about
800 hours.
I
used
this time
to
learn
about the
problem
and why it is
so difficult to
solve. I came
across all these
people saying that
it’s impossible to clean up
so we’d better just focus on prevention. But, when I started looking
into it, I couldn’t find any serious
studies proving that. I decided to
find out for myself. I finished the
school project but I couldn’t stop
thinking about it and kept working on the problem throughout the
first half year of university which I
suppose was also my last half year
of university! So then The Ocean
Cleanup Pr oject began.
JK: At the start you had
a lot of critics to face
- how did you get
people to understand that you
had a solution?
Boyan: Well, I
don’t rely on
the
support
of critics but
they were actually very helpful: they really
thought with me
about this and supplied me with feedback, and they underlined the questions we set out
to answer were the right ones. At
first I just started contacting people myself but that was a really
time-intensive process. So it really
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