In the four months it took British adventurer
and banking heir David de Rothschild and crew to sail a boat made of
discarded soft-drink bottles from San Francisco to Australia-an 8 000
mile journey, Americans used some 8.7
billion plastic bottles. Drawing attention to that waste was the point
of Rothschild's voyage aboard the Plastiki, a 60-ft. catamaran built
with 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and a fully recyclable plastic
material called Seretex and held together with organic glue made from
cashew-nut husks and sugarcane. The bottles were packed into the
Plastiki's pontoons in a pomegranate-like structure, giving the boat 68%
of its buoyancy. Rothschild's mission to change the public's perception
of plastic continues as his team brainstorms new ways to reuse the
commonly discarded material in everything from surfboards to wind
turbines.
