JK: So you’ve had to cover a lot
of different areas of science –
how did you do it all?
Boyan: I think we covered several
subjects, mainly marine engineering and oceanography but we also
did work on ecology, maritime law
and recycling. The smaller topics we
were able to do in-house. We had
a large group of volunteers, many
doing this as part of a PhD, so they
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Photo credit:The Ocean Cleanup
were able to complete this research
for free in a small amount of time,
which was great. For the engineering we primarily outsourced that to
some offshore companies and to
some engineering agencies as well
that collaborated with them. Quite
a few of them had already offered
their help so that made things a lot
easier. We just worked together
and eventually we did about 2 million euros research with only about
100,000 euros in cash by utilizing
the goodwill of people and companies and organisations doing the
actual work. It’s surprising how
much work we’ve been able to do
for so little money.
took until April/May of 2013, when
it went viral online and I started
receiving 1500 emails per day with
people offering their help, for me to
assemble this team.