Super Eco

Photo credit: How can I recycle this, flickr

Ship in a bottle? Not quite. This is a ship (a 60-foot catamaran to be more specific) made almost entirely FROM bottles—recycled plastic 2-liter soda bottles—and is destined for a 100-day, 11,000-mile Pacific voyage from San Francisco to Sydney. Why?

Because they can. The sailboat, dubbed the Plastiki (yes, that's a Kon-Tiki reference there), is the brainchild of eco adventurer David de Rothschild, who wants to provide a message about the infinite recyclability of one of the globe's most ubiquitous and pervasive substances: plastic. And not melted-down recycled, either: these bottles are used as is (well, washed, delabeled, and filled with dry ice powder that turns into CO2 gas to pressurize the bottle, and then resealed).

Except for the masts, the entire boat will be made from PET plastic: the twin hulls will be made from 12,000 to 16,000 bottles, covered with a skin of recycled PET fabric. Only about 10% of the boat's construction will be from new materials. The sailboat will have a cabin that sleeps four (de Rothschild and three crew members/scientists will be aboard). Power for the crew's laptops, GPS, and SAT phone will be provided by two wind turbines and a bank of solar panels.

The Plastiki plans stops in Hawaii, Tuvalu, and Fiji before arriving at its ultimate destination in Sydney, to be dismantled and—you guessed it—recycled again into sweaters, more bottles, whatever. And the message is clear: consumer waste is a resource, one that can be used in often surprising ways.

Now, if only something useful could be made out of all that trash in the Pacific Ocean ...