Not all plastics are created equal – and to prove it, a rakish banking heir and a team of young adventurers have built a huge ship out of plastic.
Called Plastiki, the 60-foot catamaran's hull is made of a newly developed plastic that's easier to recycle than the standard man-made stuff. The boat, as well as the voyage it will eventually undertake across the Pacific, is the conceptual child of David de Rothschild, who skirts the line between eco-playboy and serious environmentalist.
During a recent Wired.com trip to Pier 31 in San Francisco, where the boat was getting its finishing touches, de Rothschild waxed rhapsodically about the value of the plastic, srPET, which stands for self-reinforced polyethylene terephthalate.
"Dumb Plastic 1.0," de Rothschild said should be reduced, regulated against and minimized, if not abolished. srPET, though, deserves your love and attention.
"This is PET supporting PET, so when it comes to the end of its lifecycle, it can go into a machine and can be respun and rewoven," he said.
De Rothschild would like to see it replace fiberglass, which is rarely recycled. To prove its seaworthiness, de Rothschild's Adventure Ecology will be broadcasting live via satellite phones to raise awareness about the problems of plastic in the Pacific.
"We're not going out there saying we're a scientific vessel," he said. "This is an adventure that's using innovative materials to catalyze support for an issue."
And when it's over, the boat's cabin will be recycled in Sydney.
Whether the whole trip is an eco-stunt or something more important, the ship itself is marvelous to behold. Hulking inside the pier, it looks like a massive boat built from packing tape with two-liter plastic bottles stuck onto its sides.
Photo: McNair Evans
Just down the Embarcadero at Pier 45, Adventure Ecology maintains a community education center. Designed to teach kids about environmental problems, exhibits show the advantages of a recyclable plastics.
Photos: McNair Evans
The srPET panels will be filled with two-liter plastic bottles held in place by netting. Dry ice added to the bottles keeps them buoyant and rock-solid.
The plastic panels are not nailed or bolted. Instead, boat builder Omar Bonilla and the rest of the building crew use heat guns to weld the panels together. At each joint, smaller strips of the srPET are placed on top and heated to increase the structural integrity of the boat
Photos: McNair Evans
Here, we see the boat-building team working on one of the main panels of Plastiki's right pontoon. They are welding srPET to the panel to increase its surface strength.
Jo Royle is the young British skipper of Plastiki. She's a celebrated racing sailor, but she's never sailed a boat quite like this one.
"We don't know how the boat is going to perform," Royle said.
It's hard to know how the plastic bottles attached to the sides of the boat will impact her ability to control it.
"It's the maneuverability that concerns me," she said. "Any sailor will tell you, we're happy in the middle of the ocean."
The srPET panels begin as fabric. The fabric is stacked in a steel press, then taken across San Francisco Bay to Richmond, where it's baked into solid plastic. The engineering specs say this material can hold 50,000 pounds of weight per square inch — and if the whole Plastiki thing works out, the material could see more usage in other applications. Here we see Plastiki project manager Mathew Grey slicing through a role of PET fabric.
Photos: McNair Evans
The design-and-build process for the boat has been arduous and has taken quite a bit longer than expected. The designers had few previous experiences to guide them. Here we see a sketch for one of the I-beam molds.
While they've been blazing their own path with Plastiki, what the designers of the project learn could have other applications. Nathaniel Corum, a designer with the nonprofit organization Architecture for Humanity who helped create the cabin, said that what they've learned about working srPET was immediately valuable.
"It's directly applicable to any number of Architecture for Humanity projects," Corum said.
The big I-beam was designed a bit longer than necessary to build some flexibility into the construction of the boat. That meant that boat builders like Andy Fox had to trim it by hand.
The I-beams connect the two pontoons and provide the main support for the cabin.
Photos: McNair Evans
This large lamination press is used in creating solid PET panels.
Plastiki boat-building apprentice Nick Hewlings, aka Fireboy, cuts a sheet of plastic for use on Plastiki.
Photos: McNair Evans
Before the cabin was mounted on the pontoons, it sat in the drydock. Corum, the cabinet designer, said they derived the shape by crossing Buckminster Fuller–style geodesic domes with designs found in nature.
"It's got a little horseshoe crab in it, some dinosaur egg in it," Corum said. "I'd say it's got a little bug in it."
The design reflects the way the whole Plastiki project flirts with the natural, even as it promotes more-sustainable use of a man-made material.
"This project has helped me come out of my natural-builder shell and look at industrial ecology stuff," Corum said. "Sure, there's a lot of rice straw around, but let's look at fly ash, perlite, things that are lying around in big piles. One of the biggest piles is polyethylene, thermal plastic."
The cabin is a bit like a spaceship, Corum said, because it's designed to survive under almost any conditions.
One surprising aspect is that the material is quite springy. It almost feels like a trampoline at times.
Corum's also a photographer and will be a crewmember of the Plastiki's 2009 journey across the Pacific.
Photos: McNair Evans
The boat was supposed to launch back in April, so the build site is busy, bordering on frantic. The small dog, though, seems at home.
David de Rothschild hails from one of Britain's most famous banking families. De Rothschild has a strange combination of attributes. Tall, bearded, and a self-anointed champion for the environment, he seems like he'd be as comfortable at a Spanish dance club as at a protest.
He's surprisingly self-effacing at times, too. At one point during our interview, his mutt Smudge runs off to eat trash. He interrupts what he's saying to call his dog.
"Just hang out and listen to me bullshitting," he tells Smudge, patting her.
And while he might be a talker, he's more pointedly realistic than you might think.
"I don't want to go out there and replicate what WWF and Greenpeace and Oceana do," de Rothschild said. "Our slot is we create compelling stories that attract interesting organizations, and organizations that are committed to the cause."
For example, he's working with Hewlett-Packard to change the plastics the firm uses in its computers. It may or may not happen, but ultimately, that's the kind of major change by which de Rothschild's project will be measured. If more of this new material gets used, then Plastiki can be seen as more than an eco-stunt.
And the adventuring? That's mostly just for fun.
"I wish I was, like, lounging around enjoying life blissfully because our environment was perfectly in balance," de Rothschild said. "It'd be amazing if none of us had to think about any of this stuff, because we were just in tune with the natural world, we were a part of the system. But we're not."
Photos: McNair Evans
