If a boat can be made out of Popsicle sticks to be sea-worthy, why not a boat of two-liter plastic bottles? In San Francisco, not too far from Fisherman’s Wharf, David de Rothschild, environmentalist and adventurer is doing just that. He is in the process of lashing together 12,000 to 16,000 plastic bottles filled with dry ice powder in order to create two hulls for a sail boat that can travel the 11,000 miles between California and Australia.
It’s not like the sailboat named Plastiki will look like a whole mess of soda bottles bobbing on in the ocean either. A woven plastic mesh-like material will be stretched over the hulls and heated to fuse them together making the hulls and the cabin, big enough to sleep four, water tight.
During the journey, two wind turbines and solar panels will provide the juice for the batteries needed to run the computers, a GPS system and a phone. This endeavor is de Rothchild’s way of drawing attention to the need for clean, renewable energy and not make products that go to waste.
After the journey scheduled to begin in April, the plan is to recycle the boat. If the economy doesn’t perk up, who knows, maybe there will be a bunch of people looking to make sailboats out of plastic bottles. [via CNN.com]