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12,500 Plastic Bottles Later…

Jul
26
2010

Teeswater is a long way from the Pacific Ocean, but we have a connection many of us may not be aware of.

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a large area of stagnant winds and light currents – the perfect trap for floating garbage that may well have started as a littered plastic water bottle on the beach at Kincardine! And in this zone of the Pacific there is a floating pile of plastic the size of TEXAS!  Not surprising, I suppose, if you think that of 16 billion plastic water bottled produced in the United States alone every year, less than 1 billion of these bottles are ever recycled. And they are ALL completely recyclable!

A few years ago financier and ecologist David de Roschildt sat down and decided the world needs to know that plastic can be recycled on a large scale. Drawing on the 60th anniversary of Thor Heyerdahl's epic voyage on the raft Kon-Tiki, de Roschildt assembled a team to recreate the Kon-Tiki Expedition – using a boat made from recycled plastic bottles!

This morning the boat, aptly named The Plastiki, sailed into Sydney Harbour to complete a 12,000 kilometre voyage that started on March 20th in San Francisco.

The 12,500 recycled plastic bottles forming the vessel's double hull are packed together in a "pomegranate-like" structure and fixed to pontoons and held together with a fully recyclable plastic called Seretex and an organic glue made from cashew nut husks and sugarcane. Its masts are made of reclaimed aluminum irrigation pipes and its sails of recycled plastic fibres. The Plastiki uses fully renewable energy sources including solar, wind and sea turbines.

Up to 80 percent of the garbage in the ocean is recyclable plastic, accounting for the death of over a million sea-birds and marine animals every year. If 12,500 bottles can be recycled into a fully functional boat, imagine what we could do if everyone at the beach in Port Elgin or Kincardine used the recycle bins rather than dropping the bottle on the sand.

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Sources: Canoe.ca, The Plastiki

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Mark W. Law has been a writing and journalism fanatic since he was first tagged to write a 3 act ’shadow play’ – in Grade 2! Originally from the wee hamlet of Oyster Bay, BC, Mark has worked in many parts of the world, including almost all of the Canadian provinces, the United States, Europe and even a sand-filled radio station in North Africa. During that time he has written for military and local newspapers, served as editor for a number of online magazines as well as publishing his own popular ezine for new writers and artists – The ThinWire Journal. Mark has also penned more than 100 poems and essays and is an internationally known digital artist. And for anyone who lived in Northern BC during the 1980’s and 1990’s, Mark was the ‘morning weatherman’ on CBC Radio. Opinions expressed in ‘the View’ are his own and do not necessarily reflect Teeswater or Teeswater.Ca.

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This work by Mark W. Law & The Teeswater.Ca Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.