Tuesday, July 27, 2010
 Longest voyage by a boat made of plastic bottles - Plastiki sets world record
   SYDNEY, Australia -- The Plastiki , a 60-foot (18-meter) catamaran constructed from 12500 recycled plastic bottles (project head: environmental adventurer David de Rothschild) reached Sydney harbour after a four-month, 8000-nautical-mile (15,000-kilometre) voyage across the Pacific Ocean , setting the world record for the Longest voyage by a boat made of plastic bottles .
 Photo: The Plastiki, a boat made out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles, sails on Sydney Harbour after the Longest voyage by a boat made of plastic bottles .
( enlarge photo )

    "It's totally overwhelming," said project head David de Rothschild, the banking scion and environmentalist. "We're so excited to be here."

The Plastiki , which takes its name from Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition from South America to Polynesia on a raft of balsa husks, set off from San Francisco in March.

     The boat, whose six crew members included Heyerdahl's grandson Olav, travelled through a waste-strewn area of the north Pacific and stopped in the Line Islands, Western Samoa and New Caledonia before leaving for Australia.

     The Plastiki's bottles are lashed to pontoons and held together with recyclable plastic and glue made from cashew nut husks and sugar cane, while its sails are also made from recycled plastic.

     The crew relied on renewable energy -including solar panels, wind and propeller turbines and bicycle-powered electricity generators -and used water recycled from urine.

      The idea was hatched after de Rothschild was left "dumbfounded" by a United Nations report into marine ecosystems and biodiversity, and the realization "there are just these amazing human fingerprints all over our oceans."

    And although he said the impact of the voyage had exceeded his expectations, the amount of degrading plastic floating in the ocean had confirmed the scale of the problem.

     "Here you are in the middle of nowhere seeing ... these plastic items. They photo-degrade, get smaller and smaller, until they end up getting ingested by fish," which are then eaten by people, de Rothschild said.

     The United Nations Environment Program says more than 15,000 pieces of debris litter every square kilometre of the world's oceans, and another 6.4 million tonnes of plastic is dumped into seas each year.

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