Life on board the Plastiki
Do you want to cross the Pacific on a boat made of plastic bottles?" I was asked a year-and-a-half ago. "Yes," I replied without hesitation. I figured it wasn't a question that would come up again soon. The Plastiki adventure began when David de Rothschild, the British adventurer and environmentalist, came across a United Nations report on the state of the world's oceans, which pointed to the fact that our seas and their ecosystems are dying, suffocated by millions of tons of human waste, in particular plastics. There was also the "discovery" of huge gyres of plastic waste "the size of Texas" trapped in oceanic vortices. Sailor and environmentalist Charles Moore had sailed through one of these Pacific "garbage patches" in 1997 and brought back grim samples: a briny soup in which plastic nanoparticles outnumbered plankton by a ratio of six to one.
Inspired by the famous Kon-Tiki expedition, David decided to build a one-of-a-kind expedition vessel incorporating that ubiquitous item of rubbish, the plastic bottle, and sail it across the Pacific to encourage the world to "beat waste". He was keen to show that with more efficient design and a smarter understanding of how we use materials, waste can be transformed into a valuable resource. The Plastiki is the result of nearly four years of design, boat-building, hipster environmentalism and cutting-edge research into plastic polymers.
I started documenting the adventure for a National Geographic Channel film nearly two years ago, when the Plastiki was still just a bunch of wild sketches on a naval architect's notepad and a pile of dirty recycled bottles in a San Francisco workshop. Work at the construction site was slow and disorganised. All of the plastic materials used to build the boat's structure were untested and, to his credit, David insisted on a hull design that incorporated recycled plastic bottles in their original form. Whatever vessel was going to emerge from this zany endeavour would have to be strong enough to sustain months of battering and ultra-violet degradation under the punishing equatorial sun.
I went 100 miles out to sea for a weekend trial with a crew I barely knew. Five men and one woman. Most of us hadn't ever sailed before. David spent the entire time vomiting his guts out and we lost a few bottles from the hulls (which we retrieved); but skippers Jo Royle and Dave Thomson reckoned the Plastiki was ready as she would ever be. The morning we set off in March this year, a hard-boiled sailor warned me I was mad to be taking part; the Plastiki would never make it past the Golden Gate Bridge, let alone 8,398 miles across the Pacific.
drive from www.independent.co.uk