SETTING SAIL ON SEA OF DISPOSABLE PLASTIC
A handful of young men and women are constructing one of the strangest vessels
ever seen on the San Francisco waterfront - a fantastic plastic catamaran made
of cast-off plastic bottles filled with dry ice. When it is finished, sometime
next month (in April 2009), the boat, a 60-foot catamaran named Plastiki, will
sail out the Golden Gate bound across the Pacific for Australia, a voyage that will be either an absolute disaster or a huge sensation.

The mastermind of the project is David de Rothschild, a 30-year-old sometime
polar explorer and all-around adventurer who is the scion of the famous
British Rothschild banking family. De Rothschild, a tall, lanky man with a
wispy beard and intense eyes, will be accompanied by a crew of sailors,
adventurers and creative people, and individuals he calls "thought leaders."
The idea is to use the adventure to attract attention to plastic bottles,
which he says are a symbol of waste in the world.

He held a two-liter water or soft drink bottle in his hand during a tour of
the embryonic boat at Pier 31 on San Francisco's northern waterfront Monday.
"This," he said, glancing at the clear bottle, "is a dumb product." He tossed
it aside, into a bin with other bottles that will be used to float his boat.
Plastic bottles, he said, "take a huge amount of energy to manufacture," and
are used and then thrown away. Only a fraction, he said, are ever recycled.
"It is a symbol of waste," he said. -- SF Chronicle, read on:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/03/BA42167TCI.D...