Setting sail on a sea of disposable plastic

by Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle on 4 Mar 2009
A handful of young men and women are constructing one of the strangest vessels ever seen on the San Francisco waterfront - a fantastic plastic catamaran made of cast-off plastic bottles.

When it is finished, sometime next month, the boat, a 60-foot catamaran named Plastiki, will sail out the Golden Gate bound across the Pacific for Australia, a voyage that will be either an absolute disaster or a huge sensation.

The mastermind of the project is David de Rothschild, a 30-year-old sometime polar explorer and all-around adventurer who is the scion of the famous British Rothschild banking family.

Plastic bottles, he said, 'take a huge amount of energy to manufacture,' and are used and then thrown away. Only a fraction, he said, are ever recycled. 'It is a symbol of waste,' he said.

His plan is to turn the symbol of waste into an adventure, by building an all-plastic boat (only the masts are metal) and sailing it across the ocean to show what recycled material can do.

'We are out to prove a point,' he said. 'We asked ourselves, how do you capture an audience? We are using an adventure to tell stories.'

There is a ton of innovation in the Plastiki, a boat named in part to honour Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer who sailed a bamboo raft named Kon-Tiki on a Pacific voyage in 1947.

The most startling feature is that the twin hulls of the catamaran will be made of 12,000 to 13,000 plastic bottles, the kind soft drinks come in. So far the expedition has 6,000 or so.


Full story: www.sfchronicle.com.