SAN FRANCISCO — You’ve heard of a ship in a bottle. How about a ship made of plastic bottles? That would be the Plastiki, designed to sail the Pacific on an 11,000-mile voyage highlighting the dangers of living in a throwaway world.
“Waste is fundamentally a design flaw. We wanted to design a vessel that would epitomize waste being used as a resource,” said British expedition leader David de Rothschild.
The boat is named in honor of the 1947 Kon- Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, an ocean adventure that inspired de Rothschild. One of the Plastiki team members is Josian Heyerdahl, the explorer’s granddaughter.
An environmental scientist who works on business sustainability issues, Heyerdahl, 25, became part of the project after reading about it and introducing herself to de Rothschild.
She’s enthusiastic about the idea of using adventure to engage people’s attention in rethinking trash.
The Plastiki is planned as a 60-foot catamaran, with the hulls made of a rigid plastic structure forming compartments in which about 10,000 empty bottles are stacked to make it float. Project manager Matthew Grey said the hulls are partly completed and the next step is bonding the various elements of the boat together.
Grey couldn’t say how much longer it would take to complete the catamaran because “we are dealing on a daily basis with so many unknowns.”
