Boat made of recycled plastic sets sail for Sydney

Mar 21, 2010, 16:21 GMT

San Francisco - Like a giant rubber duck, the catamaran Plastiki rests in the water, looking a bit bulky yet stable at the same time, which is remarkable considering it is made almost entirely from plastic.

The ship's builders used 12,500 disposable plastic bottles to make the boat, which set sail Saturday on a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney.

'And we're off. The expedition begins,' said its creator David de Rothschild on Twitter, as the boat set sail from the town of Sausalito, California, on its estimated three-month voyage.

It's almost like a message in a bottle sent to our disposable society: By reusing resources such as plastic bottles, we can stop the pollution these materials are causing in our oceans.

A huge amount of innovation and hard work went into making the boat, said environmental activist Rothschild, speaking in Sausalito, where the Plastiki was anchored last week at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Rothschild, a British adventurer and banker's son who in 2006 crossed the Arctic on foot, set sail with a five other crew members.

The idea of recycling plastic bottles into a boat came to the 31- year-old adventurer nearly four years ago when a United Nations environmental programme report on plastic pollution in the oceans made headlines.

Rothschild assembled a group of technicians and designers at a San Francisco shipyard and they began experimenting with throw-away PET bottles. They were melted, hardened, pressed and woven into a material.

Almost everything on the Plastiki from the hull to the sails is recycled material.

'A world without plastic is something we'll never see,' Rothschild said. 'But instead of demonizing the material we should learn to reuse and recycle it,' he told the German Press Agency dpa in an earlier interview.

The boat's 20-metre-long hull is coated by 12,500 two-litre plastic bottles, giving the catamaran the necessary buoyancy.

Some of the bottles, which Rothschild purchased by the truckload from a recycling facility, still have remnants of their labels. The two aluminium masts previously were water pipes. Even the glue holding parts of the Plastiki together is environmentally friendly. It was developed by Rothschild's team and is made from cashews and sugar.

The boat doesn't offer a lot of space. The two hulls are joined by a unique cabin shaped like an igloo that has a bunk, kitchenette and a corner workspace with measuring devices, navigation instruments and computers. There also is a composting toilet, a system for collecting rainwater and an herb garden that hangs from one of the masts.

Wind turbines and solar panels deliver energy, while two stationary bicycles are available for working out during the journey.

Rothschild, heir to a fortune exceeding 1 billion dollars, would only say that the project cost more than he would have liked, but less than it could have cost. He wouldn't provide concrete details about the amount of money he received from sponsors.

His goal is that the journey will lead the way to a multitude of recycling products. He noted that plastic could be used to build houses in the developing world where a huge amount of plastic waste ends up.

The Plastiki is supposed to travel 20,000 kilometres from San Francisco south past Hawaii and the Bikini Atoll and the Tarawa Islands to Sydney.

It will take a course that follows the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where swimming plastic covers an area twice the size of the US state of Texas. It was discovered by scientists several years ago.

Researchers recently reported on a similar area in the North Atlantic where bits of plastic, most smaller than a centimetre in diameter, float on the surface of the ocean. They say there are up to 200,000 bits of plastic per square kilometre.

Plastic, largely in the form of bags and PET bottles, comprises about 80 per cent of all trash in the world's oceans, said UN environmental programme spokeswoman Elizabeth Guilbaud-Cox.

The trash is linked to the deaths of an estimated 1 million birds and 100,000 sea mammals annually. Currently, only about 20 per cent of all plastic bottles are recycled. The rest end up in landfills, spoiling landscapes and water.

Rothschild is confident that his Plastiki will not crack up while on its voyage, which would only add to the amount of trash already in the ocean.

Four hours into his journey, he wrote on Twitter: 'Travelling 2.0 Knots ummm! That's a lot of ocean ahead! Big trawler not far ahead of us! just saw our first bit marine debris a plastic cup!'