Ispectrum Magazine Ispectrum Magazine #09 | Page 24

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 23