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Plastiki is sailing into our conscience ... The Plastiki is a boat built from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is a plastic that we all should be very familiar with as it is the plastic used in the creation of plastic bottles. Plastiki is unique insofar as it has been built using an experimental fabric made from recycled PET called Seretex.

So why is this interesting?
Plastic was invented about 100 years ago, but in our lifetime it has become so prevalent in the products that we use and discard that it is now recreating our environment! — an exaggeration you may think! — but take a look at the recent BBC 2 documentary footage (below) from “The Tropic of Cancer”, in which Simon Reeve visits a beach in Hawaii that is rapidly becoming a beach of “plastic particles” rather than a beach of sand.



A poster child of the NEW industrial revolution
Plastiki shows us a future in which we think about the long-term consequences of the products we make, consume and discard. Plastiki is a SMART solution, showing us how we can rethink the plastic we use as a long-term valuable commodity rather than just a “disposal & waste issue”.

Plastic is impossible to ban
In the same way that you can’t “uninvent“ nuclear fusion — successfully banning the use of (all) plastic around the world is an unlikely ideology. What we need to do is to rethink how we make, use and reuse this material, and we need to create value for the inevitable plastic waste stream.

We need to create a value for plastic sufficient to ensure that the infrastructure for collecting and recycling this hazardous waste is ubiquitous. We also need to create this new value for plastic in order to combat our societal view that it is a disposable commodity — the reasons, both economic and ecological, for recycling plastic need to enter into our social conscience.

Plastic sandcastles
The consequence of NOT finding a way to revalue plastic is already apparent — and it will just get worse. So unless we are all comfortable with the idea of building plastic sandcastles, we need to rethink, re-evaluate and reinvent a value for the use of disposable plastic.

Find out more about David de Rothschild & Plastiki
Visit the Plastiki website to find out more about the crew, the boat and the expedition sailing across the South Pacific to Sydney. www.plastiki.com | Top |