Plastic island in paradise
Billionaire sets sail on plastic bottles to find world’s largest waste dump.
You'll find most Billionaires sailing across the worlds oceans on posh yachts, but David de Rothschild is different.
He's about to sail the Pacific in a boat made from plastic drinks bottles and recycled waste. In addition, he's not heading for any beautiful island or exclusive beach resort either, but instead an island made entirely of junk.
The British environmentalist, who is heir to one of the world's largest banking fortunes and founder of the Adventure Ecology organisation, will leave San Francisco this summer with a crew of experts to cover 12,000 nautical miles on their planned journey across the Pacific as they head toward Sydney.
This passage will take them through the world's largest waste dump the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The region just north of Hawaii has formed over the years by natural ocean currents flowing our waste into the area, which is now so dense with plastic rubbish that it is often called a plastic island.
This accumulation of litter is not just an eyesore; it is also causing a major health risk to wildlife in the area such as fish and seabirds that often mistake plastic items for food.
Rothschild and his team will conduct research, post blogs, photographs and video clips from the area, which is hundreds of miles in diameter, and document other points of environmental concern they come across on their travels.
This epic voyage is named The Plastiki, taking inspiration from Thor Heyerdal's 1947 expedition The Kontiki. The Plastiki expedition will challenge the out-of-site-out-of-mind mentality, which is so often adopted by society today when dealing with the worlds waste, and draw attention to the rethinking of our everyday human fingerprints on the natural world.
"It is our aim to captivate, inspire and activate tomorrow's environmental thinkers and doers to take positive action for our Planet and to be smart with waste," say the Plastiki crew.
Best of luck to them!
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Plastic island in paradise (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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