Earth Equity News

Adventurer's Bottle Boat to Sail Plastic Sea. By Maurice Chittenden, London Times, January 19, 2009. "It is an unmistakable message in a bottle. David de Rothschild, a British millionaire adventurer and scion of the banking dynasty, is to sail a 60ft raft made from empty mineral water bottles to the centre of the Earth's plastic sea. He will set out from San Francisco in April to alert the world to the pollution threat from a massive waste dump known as the great Pacific garbage patch. A sea of trash five times the size of Britain sits just below the surface between California and Hawaii in a becalmed area of ocean known as the north Pacific gyre. There, plastic waste is deposited in a slowly twisting, soupy mass by the circular pattern of the world's sea currents. Rothschild, 30, a 6ft 4in ecologist, has traversed both the Arctic and Antarctic. He is calling his vessel the Plastiki in homage to Kon-Tiki, the timber and hemp raft used by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer and writer, to demonstrate that South American Indians could have settled in Polynesia."