United States | A 60-foot sailboat is being built from more than 12 000 recycled plastic bottles and will sail from California to Australia - a journey of 11 000 miles. Adventure-seeking David de Rothschild from the UK hopes his unique vessel will boost the recycling of plastic bottles which, he says, are a symbol of global waste. With the exception of the metal masts, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic. 'It's all sail power,’ he told the CNN news network. ‘The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish.’
Scheduled to set sail from San Francisco in April, the vessel is called the ‘Plastiki’ - a homage of sorts to Thor Heyerdahl, the fabled Norwegian explorer who, in 1947, sailed 4300 miles across the Pacific on the balsa wood raft ‘Kon-Tiki’.
The plastic sailboat is taking shape at an old pier building not far from San Francisco’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf where thousands of two-litre soda bottles are being stripped of their labels, washed, filled with dry-ice powder and then resealed. The dry ice sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and pressurises bottles to make them rigid. The vessel’s twin hulls will be filled with between 12 000 and 16 000 bottles. Skin-like panels made from recycled PET, a woven plastic fabric, will cover the hulls and a watertight cabin which sleeps four.
Mr de Rothschild explains: ‘We actually wrap the PET fabric over the PET foam and then basically put it under a vacuum, heat it, press it and create these long PET panels. So that means the boat is, technically, one giant bottle.’
