A New York Times article recently focused on the voyage of The Plastiki. In case you haven’t heard of the boat, they describe its voyage more aptly than I can:
On March 20, the Plastiki, a 60-foot vessel made from recycled plastic bottles, set sail from San Francisco Bay on an 11,000-mile voyage to Sydney, Australia. The goal of the voyage, masterminded and financed by a banking heir, David de Rothschild, is to call attention to environmental issues like bottled water and plastic waste. Solar panels and windmills power the vessel, and the crew uses Skype, Twitter and blogs to stay in touch with the outside world.
I think this is a great project, and the article calls attention to a lot of unique challenges that sailing a boat like this poses. While initially I was excited by the ingenuity of the boat’s designers (look! another way to make use of post-use plastic!) I was quickly persuaded that the boat, while buoyant, is not going to be mimicked any time soon:
The fact that 70 percent of the Plastiki’s buoyancy is created by over 12,000 reclaimed plastic bottles, which lie directly against the flow of water, makes the boat slow and very tricky to maneuver. There were times when you could have been led to believe that we were in fact rowing across the Pacific and not sailing.
However, the successful (so far!) journey of the Plastiki will provide at least one lasting impact to our global environmental plastic footprint. The Plastiki is the first product to be made from Seretex. Jo Royle, the boat’s skipper, writes:
Seretex — a fully recyclable self reinforced PET [polyethylene terephthalate] — is a smart material to replace the use of more toxic and less recyclable plastics used to manufacture anything from garden furniture to bus stops to the interior of cars.
If Jo Royle, her crew, and media organizations like the New York times are successfully able to spread their environmental message over Skype, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube, hopefully we’ll see Seretex replacing “bad plastic” in the next few years–and less plastic use all together!
