Bon Voyage, Plastiki

This morning we gathered on a dock in Sausalito and waved goodbye to the Plastiki crew and their innovative boat as they began their 11,000 mile journey across the Pacific. It was a perfect way to spend this first day of spring: full of hope and beauty.

More on Plastiki HERE.

The details:

• The Plastiki is engineered almost entirely from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles that provide 68% of the boat’s buoyancy.
• A unique recyclable plastic material made from srPET makes up her super structure
• The mast is a reclaimed aluminum irrigation pipe
• The one-of-a-kind sail is hand-made from recycled PET cloth
• The secondary bonding is reinforced using a newly developed organic glue made from cashew nuts and sugar cane
• The Plastiki is ‘off-the-grid’ relying primarily on renewable energy systems including; solar panels, wind and trailing propeller turbines, bicycle generators, a urine to water recovery and rain water catchment system and a hydroponic rotating cylinder garden (and I was happy to see that the garden already had produce growing).

The philosophy:

• It’s about recognizing that waste is fundamentally a design flaw (it does not appear in nature)
• It’s about re-thinking waste as a resource
• It’s about cyclical ‘cradle-to-cradle’ philosophies rather than linear thinking when it comes to how we design our world
• It’s about a better understanding of the lifecycle’s and materials used in our everyday lives
• It’s about being curious and open, being prepared to let go of assumptions in order to undertake a new ‘Planet 2.0’ way of thinking and acting
• It’s about acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers and that nobody is as smart as everybody
• It’s about being collaborative and curious so to engage multiple perspectives, skills, opinions and organizations
• It’s about constantly learning, unlearning and re-learning
• It’s about re-integrating back into the web of life by recognizing and reducing our human fingerprints on the natural world
• It’s about moving on from just articulating the problems and inspiring action of the solutions
• It’s about encouraging the world to reduce, reuse, recycle and rethink more of the planets natural resources
• It’s about delivering a spectacular global “Message in a Bottle”.

why:

• It is estimated that almost all of the marine pollution in the world is comprised of plastic materials. The average proportion varied between 60% and 80% of total marine pollution.¹
• In many regions in the northern and southern Gyres, plastic materials constitute as much as 90 to 95% of the total amount of marine debris.²
• Scientists estimate that every year at least 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die when become entangled in plastic pollution or ingest it.³
• According to Project Aware, 15 billion pounds of plastic are produced in the U.S. every year, and only 1 billion pounds are recycled. It is estimated that in excess of 38 billion plastic bottles and 25 million Styrofoam cups end up in landfill and although plastic bottles are 100% recyclable, on average only 20% are actually recycled.

You can follow the journey at www.theplastiki.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.