SAN FRANCISCO — Banking heir David de Rothschild is sailing across the Pacific Ocean on 12,000 plastic bottles.
The discarded containers were made into a catamaran called the Plastiki, which is heading for the Line Islands, 1,300 miles south of Hawaii, on a mission to showcase recycling. The crew includes two grandchildren of late Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon-Tiki fame.
“I wanted to get people to think sensibly that waste isn’t really waste but merely inefficient design and that we can turn it into a resource,” de Rothschild, 31, said by satellite phone as the boat sailed west from San Francisco. “Every day, we are seeing bits of trash floating past us. They look like jellyfish, but then we realize they are plastic bags.”
The Plastiki crew is logging the GPS positions of trash it encounters, interacting with school classes and posting photos on its website, . The trip is an outreach of de Rothschild’s London company, Adventure Ecology, which advocates for environmental causes, including ocean cleanup.
At 60 feet, the Plastiki isn’t large for an oceangoing vessel. It has encountered rough seas and a curious shark since leaving San Francisco on March 20 for the 3,400-mile trip, de Rothschild said.
