The Plastiki, a boat with a hull built of 12,500 plastic bottles, was set to sail from a Sausalito yacht harbor on 20th March 2010  on a risky and adventurous voyage across the Pacific.

The purpose, said expedition leader David de Rothschild, is to draw attention to the health of the oceans and to demonstrate the value of recycled plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew of five hope to sail to Australia, a voyage of about 11,000 nautical miles.

The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl's raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.

The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.

The Plastiki was built on the San Francisco waterfront in 2009 and has been making trial voyages on the bay.

The trip was set to begin at 9:30 a.m. at the Clipper Yacht Harbor, 420 Harbor Drive, and the vessel will be escorted to sea by small boats. It should pass under the Golden Gate Bridge about an hour after it leaves Sausalito.

Skipper Jo Royle said the first port of call will be one of the Line Islands, a small group of atolls south of Hawaii.

The voyage can be followed on the Internet at www.theplastiki.com.

There are some who would say that Plastiki is just one big publicity stunt - and those people would be absolutely right. The purpose of the strange-looking and improbable eco-yacht - and the goal of David de Rothschild, the rest of the crew, and the project as a whole – is not to set a record, nor to prove any new design, but to attract worldwide public attention to a tremendous and growing problem out in the middle of our oceans. To that end, it seems the crew is willing to do almost anything, including opening themselves to public ridicule and risking their lives, to get people talking about the issues and health hazards of plastic pollution. So yes, Plastiki is a crazy and outlandish scheme - a great big publicity stunt – aimed at starting the types of conversations that might eventually lead to solutions, and it seems it's already working.

The Problem

To understand Plastiki, you must first understand the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. Over a decade ago, Charles Moore returned from a trans-Pacific yacht race with a trashy story. He wasn't the very first to notice the issue, but he was the first to really sound the alarm, and what he was saying was unbelievable to those who think of the oceans as endless. Captain Moore said that the Pacific Ocean is full of garbage – specifically plastics – and that in a huge area known as the North Pacific Gyre, it was nearly impossible to NOT find pollution everywhere you looked.

Unfortunately, some of the news media that picked up on the story reported that the mass of plastic was in the form of “an island the size of Texas,” and since then, many people think that the “Pacific Garbage Patch” is something they should be able to see on Google Earth, or even visit and have a walk around. That is not the case, unfortunately. If it were a cohesive mass, it could be dealt with more easily, and actually would not pose nearly the problem. What's out in the North Pacific, and in at least four other large ocean locations around the world, is a massive area where the water like a plastic soup.

The North and South Atlantic, the North and South Pacific, and the Indian Ocean each spin slowly due to the Coriolis effect (clockwise in the North, counter-clockwise in the South). The Japanese Current, the Gulf Stream, etc. are on the outside of these vortices, and toward the middle of each is an area of low motion. One well known area is the Sargasso Sea, and another is the North Pacific Gyre (that's gyre, as in gyrate, gyroscope, etc.). Stir something insoluble into a glass of water (like ground pepper) and you'll notice that whatever doesn't stick to the edges (wash ashore) will tend to move toward the middle of the glass. Same thing here, but on a much bigger scale. In this case, it's trillions upon trillions of tiny bits of plastic that collect in the middle. They don't sink, and they don't break down – they just stay.