Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Great Article: Plastiki

The world needs men and women who do great things: lead nations, invent new devices, discover miracle cures - all those things that make our lives better. But we also need adventurers, people who do things for the hell of it, who sail off beyond the far horizon to prove some point or other.

David de Rothschild, a tall, rangy man with a plummy English accent, scion of the famous British banking family, is one of those people. He and a crew of five others have just completed an amazing voyage, sailing a strange-looking craft made of 12,500 plastic bottles from the Golden Gate to Sydney. The 8,000-mile trip took four months.

The point, he said, was to show the world that the "shocking and unnecessary use" of disposable plastic harms the oceans' health.

De Rothschild believed that by building a boat of tough plastic, with floatation supplied by liter-size bottles filled with carbon dioxide, he could call attention to plastic waste in the ocean. He called it "a message in a bottle".

Continue reading here.

1 comment:

  1. I was following the Plastiki adventure in the news and on blogs. That's a good point; the world does need adventurers who will just sail off into the sunset to bring attention to some matter or other. I hope that action is taken to clean the earths waters because of the attention Plastiki's adventure brought.

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