In the drink

Expedition plans trip from San Francisco to Australia on a catamaran built from recycled plastic bottles

If the planet has a plughole, it better be in the North Pacific. Because that’s where a great deal of the globe’s plastic rubbish has ended up, swirling in a vast gyre of current the size of France. Now a completely recycled catamaran built and piloted by David de Rothschild is about to cruise through it in a mission to raise public awareness. Named the PlasTiki, the boat tips a nod to Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary 1947 Pacific Kontiki Expedition – when the ocean was a whole lot cleaner.

Environmental surveys have discovered that this zone is literally swimming with plastic, a soup of tiny particles and larger objects either bobbing on the surface or drifting up to ten metres below the surface. Tests have shown that in this area, plastic outweighs plankton 6 to 1 by weight. It'll take thousands of years to break up – and most of it will end up in the food chain. That means us lot, unfortunately.

The construction of PlasTiki itself is an innovation – thousands of empty plastic bottles, hardened with dry ice and sealed with sugar glue. The hull is reinforced with a new recycled polymer that in turn can be recycled. The boat features a composting toilet and renewable onboard energy sources too: a sailing testament to the environmental issues at play.

The mission is part of Rothschild’s Adventure Ecology campaign to raise awareness through marketing-smart, thought-provoking ideas. You didn’t think that making a boat out of old rubbish was going to be easy, did you? It isn’t – and to date, they haven’t even had a chance to test the materials' resistance to salt water.

The PlasTiki sails this summer – log on to www.adventureecology.com/theplastiki for details.