Float it, don’t toss it – Plastic can be a problem in many ways, including polluting the ocean. To solve the transportation problem AND the pollution problem, build a boat out of discarded plastic bottles.
Just such a boat–the “Plastiki”–made from over 12 thousand plastic bottles, completed a 4 month, 9,000 mile, voyage from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. It followed the path of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a sea of trash about 5 times the size of the UK that floats just below the surface between California and Hawaii.
BBC News reports that the boat was named after the raft called the “Kon-Tiki,” which Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific in 1947 to prove that early man could have navigated long distances using primitive boats. Heyerdahl’s grandson, Olav was a member of Plastiki’s crew.
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Art credit: Dreamstime.com
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