Happy New Year readers and cheers to a greener 2010! What do you think the best way to draw attention to our consumerist wasteful society would be?  Start an eco-friendly website about your cause?  Hold a rall?  Or build a boat out of recycled plastic water bottles? According to David de Rothschild, a British environmentalist, building a 60-foot sailboat out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles is the best way to attract attention to the plight of waste and the ever-growing need to recycle.

His master plan is obviously working, as we along with CNN, The Huffington Post and National Geographic (to name a few outlets) are all talking about his project. de Rothschild’s brainchild is currently being constructed on a San Francisco pier and is scheduled to launch in April 2010. David de Rothschild’s eco-ography is quite impressive, CNN discovered that he is “the scion of a wealthy British banking family, he is one of only several dozen people to traverse both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. In 2005 he founded Adventure Ecology, an organization that uses field expeditions to call attention to environmental issues”. de Rothschild is constructing an eco-friendly catamaran style boat with his team, aptly named Plastiki.

The Plastiki will have a permanent crew of made up of scientists, de Rothschild, sailors and other various personnel. David told CNN that his boat is going to run on” all sail power”. He went on to say that “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.”  According to National geographic “the voyage will make several island stops in the Pacific, and will pass through the famed Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where ocean currents for years have collected human-created debris much of it -  plastic.”  The Plastiki has already set sail on the sea and is currently on dry dock over the holiday season.

It is this juxtaposition, on his 100-day adventure, of waste and an eco-friendly outlook that de Rothschild is interested in and hopefully it will draw attention to the wasteful ways of society. Many have been skeptical of this project, especially when he approached his team with the idea. This has been anything but smooth sailing so far as one of the major challenges was finding an adhesive product that would not only hold the catamaran together but also stay true to the parameters of the project. As National Geographic discovered when doing a piece on de Rothschil, an eco-friendly solution was found in “a waterproof glue made from cashew nuts and sugar”.

This is not the first floating project to garner attention of late.  As you may remember there was the floating sustainable Waterpod project, but this is much more experimental than an eco-friendly, self-sufficient dome that circled New York City. Also, de Rothschild’s piece is not really performance art.  It’s a recyclable political statement that I think we can all stand behind even though we don’t have the resources or the know how to  embark on such a voyage ourselves.

I’d like to wish de Rothschilds an eco-friendly bon voyage and safe journey for himself, the crew and all involved.  I’ll be following you along the way.  I cannot wait for the next chapter of this remarkable story so we can learn from such an eco-friendly journey.

The Plastiki Expedition:

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