Three months ago, the adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild and his crew set off across the Pacific in a boat, the Plastiki, made out of 12,000 empty plastic bottles. His aim was to draw attention to the vast amounts of waste that we
"We’ve been at sea for nearly 70 days and travelled approximately 5,500 nautical miles. Some notable points of the journey so far include the fact that we could not catch a fish for 3 weeks (not due to our perfect technique, of course!), and only 3 since then (2 tuna and 1 dorado), we have seen no sharks – although we have seen pilot whales and dolphins amongst the polluted waters of the South Pacific.
Having reached the southern tropics the temperature exceeds 100F daily, so as you can imagine the crew and I try to spend as much time in the water as possible. This gives us the opportunity to check and maintain the boat from the underside Once underwater we continue to notice that if you move your hand slowly in front of your face you quickly accumulate many molecular-sized plastic particles on your palm, often know as “mermaid’s tears”. While incredibly sad, this spurs us on our mission to highlight the plight of our oceans and to ultimately rethink waste as a resource. We hope that the Plastiki, along with your influence, helps to provide a platform to showcase real-world solutions to these problems and make them an adventure.
We have now set sail on what we believe will be the final leg to Sydney; we’ve secured the structure and thoroughly tested each part of the Plastiki during our stop in Western Samoa in anticipation of the fluctuating weather systems we expect to experience as we cross the Tasman Sea. It remains the expedition’s mission to encourage the watching world to reuse, reduce, recycle and rethink waste as a resource and, importantly, to refuse “dumb” single use plastics. One of Plastiki’s global goals is to see a reduction in the amount of human-made waste heading out to landfill and sea. We recently launched a pledge called My Plastiki, which has seen nearly 4,000 people pledge to reduce their use of new plastic bottles, plastic bags and styrene foam."
Three months ago, the adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild and his crew set off across the Pacific in a boat, the Plastiki, made out of 12,000 empty plastic bottles. His aim was to draw attention to the vast amounts of waste that we generate each day and highlight how it can be turned into resources. These lines are an extract from a letter he sent recently to let us know how the voyage was going.
