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Boat made of plastic bottles to make ocean voyage

Posted by: Maven on March 10, 2009 at 4:57 am

From CNN:

Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles through treacherous seas.

This 60-foot sailboat, the Plastiki, is being built from more than 12,000 recycled plastic bottles. You’d have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point.

De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic.

“It’s all sail power,” he said. “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.”

An earlier story in the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned that they were using dry ice. This article explains the construction technique a little more:

The plastic sailboat is taking shape in an old pier building not far from this city’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf. Here, thousands of two-liter soda bottles are being stripped of their labels, washed, filled with dry-ice powder and then resealed. The dry ice sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and pressurizes the bottle, making it rigid.

Read more from CNN by clicking here.

March 10, 2009 · Filed Under Oceans & Beaches

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