David de Rothschild's voyage of the Plastiki

Author: Bernd Hölzner

David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology and close friend of the DLD community, will depart in March 2009 on an new expedition: a 7,500-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat made of recycled materials, mostly plastic bottles ("Plastiki"). De Rothschild will be navigating through the so-called Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating landfill located between California and Hawaii where garbage from all over the world has accumulated.

The trip is intended to change attitudes towards the world's oceans and will spotlight the oceanic pollution by domestic trash, oil, industrial discharges, see dumping operations and so on. "What people don't know is that a lot of Western countries send their waste to Asia to be sorted out," de Rothschild explains. "That's how trash ends up in our oceans. There are now practically more floating containers in our oceans than there are whales." The project title "Plastiki" refers to Thor Heyerdal's Kontiki Expedition undertaken in 1947. Read more on National Geographic's Adventure Blog.

photo by Gregg Segal

 

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Tags: adventure ecology· david de rothschild· dld· dld-friends· eastern pacific garbage patch· oceanic pollution· plastic bottle vessel· plastiki