By Deirdre Robert
Posted on July 22, 2010. Listed in:
On March 22 this year, Adventure Ecology founder and environmentalist David de Rosthschild and his crew set sail from San Francisco on the Plastiki, a unique 60-foot catamaran engineered from approximately 12, 500 reclaimed plastic bottles and srPET, a fully recyclable material.
And now, 7500 nautical miles later, the boat has anchored in Mooloolaba, Queensland, not too far off from the team’s originally planned destination of Sydney.
The expedition arouse as a means of drawing attention to the issues of waste pollution. Part of this awareness involved sailing through the Pacific Gyre – a concentrated mass of rubbish in the Pacific ocean.
So where did the concept for the recycled plastic boat come from? David de Rothschild conceived the idea almost four years ago after reading a report “Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Deep Waters and High Seas‟ by UNEP, which indicated that the world’s oceans were in serious threat from pollution, in particular plastic waste.
The Plastiki is also part inspired by the famous Kon-Tiki voyage - the expedition, led by Thor Heyerdahl, sought to prove that Polynesian settlement by South American explorers was possible.
For the initial phase, Rothschild invited a team of experts to help answer the question, “could a fully recyclable performing vessel be engineered almost entirely out of reclaimed plastic bottles, cross the Pacific whilst demonstrating real world solutions?”
The design inspiration was a fruity one, with the structure taken largely from the formation of a pomegranate, which packs together many soft seeds to create a hard outer structure. The designers knew that fitting the plastic bottles together, like the seeds of the pomegranate, was key.
After testing numerous prototypes, the Plastiki team settled on using approximately 12,500 reclaimed plastic soft-drink bottles that have been fixed into pontoons. The bottles provide the boat with 68 percent of its buoyancy.
Even during the early day designs, the Plastiki aimed to be fully sustainable throughout, powered by renewable energy systems such as solar, wind and sea turbines.
It’s not the first time a nautical plastic theme has arisen in a bid to draw attention to waste matters. A while back we featured a story on Recycle Island, an ambitious project by Netherlands-based WHIM Architecture. The architects plan to build the island, constructed entirely from plastic waste sourced from the ocean, in the same spot the Plastiki sailed through, the North Pacific Gyre.
Find out more about the Plastiki
