March 3rd, 2009
Green crusaders to cross Pacific in a plastic bottle
Well, not just a single plastic bottle, thousands of plastic bottles. Filled with dry ice to keep them afloat. And the crew thinks they’re going to make it all the way to Australia? I know that plastic trash is indestructible, but….
Funded by a member of the Rothschild family the sixty-foot catamaran rests at a pier in San francisco where the crew preps for the voyage. 30 year old David de Rothschild is the crew chief and he’s taking along a crew of sailors and “thought leaders.”
The goal is to underline the wastefulness of plastic drink bottles which are helping trash the planet. Meanwhile the crew needs thousands more used soft drink plastic bottles to complete the twin hulls. The boat is christened the “Plastiki” in honor of Thor Heyerdahl’s historic voyage over sixty years ago.
Think of this as adventure capital, rather than simply venture capital. Young Rothschild also has a foundation he’s funding to help spur innovation in re-using and recycling and eliminating waste, Adventure Ecology. One obvious goal of the planned voyage: to underline the problem of plastic waste in the Pacific.
Loading ...Ocean explorers report a plastic sea within the sea, an area twice the size of the continental U.S. that is covered with plastic driven there by the Pacific’s marine currents. The wonderful part of this whole trash mess: most of this plastic is made from petroleum and requires considerable energy to produce. Takes almost no energy to toss an empty bottle in a creek in California so it ends up in the mid-Pacific.
Easterners cannot be smug. The southern Atlantic has its own plastic waste waves. And that mass is increasing. Plastic is now the most prevalent form of ocean-going trash in the world. We need a marine algae that will turns this stuff back into disgestible hydrocarbons.
For a long tine the plastic bottle problem has been obvious. Even before the Bipehenol, scare drove that chenmicalout of the bottle business. Many local governments have taken action against plastic bottled water, but it persists as a huge profit center for “soft drink” companies.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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