Comments on: Plastiki: Message in a bottle raft

British adventurer David de Rothschild plans to sail from San Francisco to Australia in a 60-foot vessel made from recycled plastic bottles--and to teach the world a few lessons about recycling along the way.

[sumanth165]

An interesting step towards 'Planet 2.0'

[man_w_balls]

[chugging mountain dew] "Whoo! My boat's gonna be ready soon!"

The world's answer to global warming? We'll just float around on all our damn garbage after the seas rise to flood the mainland. What an "illuminated" idea.

[nSeika]

There?s boat from plastic bottle and load of enviromental friendly devices in that raft, yes.

But I still failed to see how or why others will keep that ?awareness? long enough or if they will see the news more than a break in the news.
Besides, if being green is too expensive and bothersome, just a good intention to save the earth might not be enough to force peoples to change, it?s costly.

[nifty123]

Though I do recycle, I am more often re-using and re-purposing. The idea of this raft or boat is rather ridiculous as it is seeming to take too much added energy to create this pastiki. In the short pictorial, I saw blow torches on almost every table, other plastics in the form of plastic sheets, dry ice being used to re-inflate bottles, in just that small window of what they are doing! I don't imagine that anyone is actually blowing up the plastiki with manual power.

If you really want to make an impact, do all this without creating any additional waste! Is that possible? Probably, but then there would be no time for pretty pictures.

[hassan_bin_sober]

I hope he remembers to make sure the bottles are empty!

[hassan_bin_sober]

Does this qualify as a "Ghetto Yacht"?

[donsms]

This guy`s as wanky as that British Bird who last year rowed across the Pacific from Cali to Hawaii to raise awareness about the large plastic garbage mass out there.Does anyone remember that stunt?

[duggerdm]

If you truly want to understand recycling problems in order to realize the maximum recovery potential from recycling, the first place to start is studying the economics of recycling. We don't recycle because we have not developed the economic incentives to recycle. While I love to sail catamarans, the concept of using one as cobbled up platform to somehow demonstrate the possibility of recycling (well understood) without first demonstrating the economic feasibility (both energy and financial economics) in my opinion is an extraordinary intellectual disconnect with the real problems involved in recycling. Secondly, using a trans-oceanic adventure to publicize recycling where the focal center piece off shore and out of sight and availability to most PR resources - is even more questionable in strategy. As pointed out the strategy has very limited potential of making and maintaining a significant impression on either the public, researchers or gov. policy makers. The resources spent on this kind of quixotic jousting would have been far better and more directly employed exploring the economics of new processes and technologies for recapturing the sunk investment value of the petro-chemical materials in the plastic products on a cost efficient industrial scale.

[blusky08]

Give us a break already. Anyone else less than impressed by the self-absorbed super-rich using the "save the planet" nonsense as a platform to show what caring people they are?

Sorry, I just know way too many people who "care" about the planet, unborn children, etc., but wouldn't give a penny to a real live person dying in the street. It's easy to "care" when you don't have to get involved or sacrifice anything.

BTW: Nice little system the corporations have concocted. You pay them for the product, then you give it back to them, and then they sell it to you again...repeat.

[Scott Gardener]

A marvel in engineering, and all you pundits out there are doing is trying to break down the significance of what he's doing, saying it doesn't really matter. The point of the project isn't neccessarily to get us all to build rafts; it's a concept model showing off how the materials that we're throwing away could be put to use. Where do you get off saying that the super-rich don't care about individual poor, or that environmentalism runs counter to such causes? Ever hear of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation? As a side note, am I the only one who thinks of The Police's song "Message in a Bottle"? A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore...