By Balasubramanyam Seshan: Subscribe to Balasubramanyam's RSS feed
July 28, 2010 11:58 AM EDT
The plastic-bottle boat Plastiki completed the epic voyage reaching Sydney, Australia on an 8,000 nautical mile adventure lasting over 130 days aimed to create awareness of dangers posed by plastic waste to the environment.
Plastiki, a catamaran ship made out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and other recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and waster products, set off on March 20, 2010 from San Francisco, California with ten-member crew to sail across the Pacific Ocean.
The expedition plans to make landfall in Sydney, Australia after visiting several sites of ecological importance. Plastiki arrived in Sydney Darling Harbour at 11 am Sydney time on July 26, 2010.
The Plastiki will be moored at Australian National Maritime Museum, Darling Harbour for a month and will be open to visitors on August 1 to explore this one of a kind plastic bottle boat.
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“I really want to thank everybody that was behind this expedition, supporting and following us during the voyage. The connectivity between the boat and you, the supporter, has been extraordinary, and a huge boost to the crew throughout the last 130 days of the expedition,” said environmentalist David de Rothschild, the Captain of Plastiki and founder of Adventure Ecology company.
The Plastiki is engineered almost entirely from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles that provide 68 percent of the boat’s buoyancy. The Plastiki is a modern vessel that has taken advantage of all available sustainable design technologies and cutting edge material, which is powered by technology partner Hewlett-Packard Co.
The world gets through a massive 230 million tons of plastic in a year. More than 90 percent of plastics are not recycled. The UK plastics industry is worth 17.5 billion, and employs 220,000 people.
According to United Nations Environment Programme, for every litre of water poured into a bottle, another two litres are used in its manufacture. Most of the marine pollution in the world is comprised of plastic materials. The average proportion varies between 60 percent and 80 percent of total marine pollution.
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