The Plastiki, a boat made entirely out recyclable plastics, set sail this Saturday from Sausalito Bay, near San Francisco. In the four days it has been at sea, the Plastiki has travelled two hundred and ninety-three nautical miles. And it has a ways to go. The crew of six, which includes the environmentalist and banking heir David de Rothschild, plans to cross the Pacific ocean, highlighting the environmental waste that litters the ocean. “Travelling 2.0 Knots,” tweeted de Rothschild from the boat. (An exercise bike powers the Plastiki’s laptops.) “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!”
If the boat—which is made out of twelve thousand plastic bottles—makes it all the way to Sydney, Australia, as they hope it will in three months, then it will mimic the voyage of Thor Heyerdahl, who traversed the Pacific in 1947 with the Kon-Tiki, a primitive raft made out of balsa logs. De Rothschild conceived of the expedition four years ago, in 2006, after returning from a trip to the North Pole and learning about the Great Eastern Garbage patch in an article in Natural History.
Last year, John Colapinto wrote an article about de Rothschild and his struggles to make the Plastiki a reality (the launch date, when the article went to press in March 2009, had been pushed back to the summer of 2009). Below is a video I filmed that winter in San Francisco, which documented the making of the world’s first recyclable-plastic boat.