Largest catamaran made from plastic

In spring 2009, David de Rothschild (UK), founder of Adventure Ecology, will set sail in a 60-foot catamaran, made from plastic bottles, self-reinforcing plastic (Polyethylene terephthalate) and recycled waste products on a 10,500 nautical mile voyage across the Pacific from San Francisco, USA to Sydney, Australia. The aim of the voyage is to show how waste can be used as a resource by utilising a highly consumed item, such as the plastic bottle, and by sailing through an area of pollution that is popularly termed the “great Pacific garbage patch” to highlight the pollution threat. This is an area of plastic rubbish - five times the size of Great Britain – that sits just below the surface between California and Hawaii in the North Pacific gyre (vortex) and draws in waste because of the circular pattern of the world’s sea currents. The catamaran is named “Plastiki” in honour of “Kon-Tiki”, the balsa wood raft in which the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated, in 1947, the possibility that South American Indians could have sailed the Pacific and settled in Polynesia.