Photo credit:The Ocean Cleanup
JK: Do you think it’s helped not
being restricted by traditional
funding bodies?
Boyan: I think it’s helped in two
ways. First, the mentality of academics in general is all focused on
publications and grants and as you
need a certain amount of publications, you try to split them up into
as many as possible. Secondly, our
efforts are purely applied research.
We aren’t looking at questions that
don’t really have answers like:
“Why is the plastic only at a certain depth?” It would be interesting
but it doesn’t get us any closer to
our goal of removing 50% of the
Great Pacific garbage patch in ten
years time. We did look into some
PhD funding but if we went ahead
with that the results wouldn’t be
delivered until 2016. By then the
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