Save the Seas - Save the Planet
A campaign sponsored by two Balearic Nautical Publications who care...The Islander Gaceta Nautica
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Many marine animals and birds mistakenly ingest plastic and die, or become entagled and choke in plastic bags that are floating!
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SAVE THE SEAS FROM PLASTIC!
Article from The Islander April 10th 2010 Issue 152
SAVE THE SEAS FROM PLASTIC!
The Plastiki, a boat with a hull built of 12,500 plastic bottles, was set to sail from a Sausalito yacht harbor on 20th March 2010 on a risky and adventurous voyage across the Pacific.
The purpose, said expedition leader David de Rothschild, is to draw attention to the health of the oceans and to demonstrate the value of recycled plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew of five hope to sail to Australia, a voyage of about 11,000 nautical miles.
The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl's raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.
The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.
The Plastiki was built on the San Francisco waterfront in 2009 and has been making trial voyages on the bay.
The trip was set to begin at 9:30 a.m. at the Clipper Yacht Harbor, 420 Harbor Drive, and the vessel will be escorted to sea by small boats. It should pass under the Golden Gate Bridge about an hour after it leaves Sausalito.
Skipper Jo Royle said the first port of call will be one of the Line Islands, a small group of atolls south of Hawaii.
The voyage can be followed on the Internet at www.theplastiki.com.
There are some who would say that Plastiki is just one big publicity stunt - and those people would be absolutely right. The purpose of the strange-looking and improbable eco-yacht - and the goal of David de Rothschild, the rest of the crew, and the project as a whole – is not to set a record, nor to prove any new design, Sbut to attract worldwide public attention to a tremendous and growing problem out in the middle of our oceans. To that end, it seems the crew is willing to do almost anything, including opening themselves to public ridicule and risking their lives, to get people talking about the issues and health hazards of plastic pollution. So yes, Plastiki is a crazy and outlandish scheme - a great big publicity stunt – aimed at starting the types of conversations that might eventually lead to solutions, and it seems it's already working.
The Problem
To understand Plastiki, you must first understand the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. Over a decade ago, Charles Moore returned from a trans-Pacific yacht race with a trashy story. He wasn't the very first to notice the issue, but he was the first to really sound the alarm, and what he was saying was unbelievable to those who think of the oceans as endless. Captain Moore said that the Pacific Ocean is full of garbage – specifically plastics – and that in a huge area known as the North Pacific Gyre, it was nearly impossible to NOT find pollution everywhere you looked.
Unfortunately, some of the news media that picked up on the story reported that the mass of plastic was in the form of “an island the size of Texas,” and since then, many people think that the “Pacific Garbage Patch” is something they should be able to see on Google Earth, or even visit and have a walk around. That is not the case, unfortunately. If it were a cohesive mass, it could be dealt with more easily, and actually would not pose nearly the problem. What's out in the North Pacific, and in at least four other large ocean locations around the world, is a massive area where the water like a plastic soup.
The North and South Atlantic, the North and South Pacific, and the Indian Ocean each spin slowly due to the Coriolis effect (clockwise in the North, counter-clockwise in the South). The Japanese Current, the Gulf Stream, etc. are on the outside of these vortices, and toward the middle of each is an area of low motion. One well known area is the Sargasso Sea, and another is the North Pacific Gyre (that's gyre, as in gyrate, gyroscope, etc.). Stir something insoluble into a glass of water (like ground pepper) and you'll notice that whatever doesn't stick to the edges (wash ashore) will tend to move toward the middle of the glass. Same thing here, but on a much bigger scale. In this case, it's trillions upon trillions of tiny bits of plastic that collect in the middle. They don't sink, and they don't break down – they just stay.
The Plastic
Of course, that plastic comes from humans. To follow just one example: If you were to take a plastic grocery bag made of polyethylene (the PE in LDPE and HDPE) and leave it in the sun, it will eventually crumble away to tiny bits – mostly due to a process called photo-degradation (as opposed to the bio-degradation of a paper grocery bag). Less of an eyesore, but when you look closely, it's still little bits of polyethylene – it doesn't readily break down into anything else through any natural or even most chemical processes. That is to say that it is both inert and stable, which is why PE makes such an excellent container for everything from "drinking" (AKA: tap) water to hydrochloric acid.
Polyethylene is slightly (3-7%) lighter than water. Its relative weight, or specific gravity (s.g.), is around 0.93 to 0.97, whereas pure water is 1.00. In other words, the little bits of it float, but just barely (for comparison, ground cork's s.g. is only 0.16 – or 84% lighter than water). In a container, the plastic will float to the surface, but in the ocean, the little bits of plastic “bounce” with the wind and wave action, remaining close to, but not on, the surface of the sea. That's the “plastic soup.” It is all that polyethylene, as well as many other plastics, broken down into tiny bits, and “floating” within several feet of the surface of the water. Unfortunately, since that's where sunlight penetrates, this is also where the ocean food chain begins.
A Matter of Health
If the plastic is inert and stable, who cares? Well, recently, scientists have noticed that some very nasty chemicals, like PCB's for example (banned in the US for over 30 years), are somehow finding their way into fish caught far out at sea. PCB's don't dissolve well in sea water, and they are notably heavier, so it was long thought that any PCB's that made it to the ocean would sink out of the way (or at least become some future generation's problem to deal with). Thus, scientists had been perplexed as to where the PCB's are coming from. But then a new theory was put forth, and suddenly it all made sense.
Many persistent organic pollutants like PCB's have a high lipid solubility – meaning they're oily, or at least can be dissolved in oily materials. If you've ever tried to clean spaghetti sauce or any kind of grease off of a plastic container, then you know exactly what's going on. It seems things like the PCB's literally stick to the porous surface of the plastics, much like stubborn cooking grease. So, instead of falling to the depths, some of the most persistent toxins man has introduced to the world are staying glued to some of the most persistent garbage we've ever produced, and being introduced right back into our own food chain. Put simply: Our chickens of the sea are coming home to roost!
The way the toxins like PCB's get into the food chain is via those plastic bits. Small fish tend to eat everything that fits into their mouths (which worked out well for hundreds of millions of years), so they eat the poisoned plastic pieces. Digestive juices and processes then break the physical bond between the PCB's and the plastic, and introduce the PCB's into the fish's fatty tissues. Then the small fish are eaten by bigger fish, until the toxins from all the plastics that all those little fish ate, end up concentrated on the Mahi Mahi platter at your local restaurant.
Don't eat fish? Well, fish byproducts are used in livestock feed. Organic vegan? Fish emulsion is a common “natural” fertilizer. By now, you're getting the picture: That problem way out there in the middle of the ocean is now in your refrigerator. And remember, we only looked at one kind of plastic, and one kind of toxin. It's a big, big mess out there, and getting bigger. But the message isn't that the sky is falling. Though we can't yet solve the problem, we can slow its progress while we figure it out. The first step is to get the word out, and as noted: Plastiki is an attempt to do that.
The Plastiki Boat
As if to prove the point and title of this article, the name Plastiki is itself an homage to another publicity stunt. In 1946-7, Thor Heyerdahl and his crew made and sailed a boat across the South Pacific to prove an anthropological theory regarding how the Pacific was first peopled. The theory itself has been all but entirely refuted, but the voyage of Kon-Tiki is a story nearly as ingrained in many sailor's hearts as the voyages of Cook or Magellan. You have a theory, you make a boat, and while the others stay debating in faculty lounges and coffee shops, you “just do it!” Heyerdahl has become a legend because he didn't just walk the dock and talk the talk, he and the crew put their reputations and lives on the line, and set sail.
That seems to be the spirit behind the Plastiki boat. When you get to the base of it, and you look past the muddled environmental messages, the preaching to the choir, the eco-friendly this and the recyclable that, you get to the real motivation. You can talk and talk, you can visit college campuses and chat online in any number of mutual appreciation societies. But if you want to be heard by the people who can make the difference, you have to be like Thor – you have to get away from the insular comforts of the first-world urbanite, and actually go out into the real world and do something. It's not a coincidence, after all, that two of the five crew expected to set out on the voyage are Thor Heyerdahl's own grandchildren.
It's important to note that Plastiki isn't the first boat constructed to bring attention to the Pacific Garbage Patch. YachtPals readers may remember Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal taking a raft made of plastic bottles and sailing from California to Hawaii. “What are those clowns doing?” was the reaction from the press and public, and precisely the response the duo and their shore team were looking for. People just couldn't help but comment on the weird looking craft, nor to speculate as to the sanity of her crew and their chances of survival. Wrapped in that newsworthy weirdness was the core message that there was a problem with plastic garbage in the ocean. By the time the raft (appropriately named JUNK) made it to Hawaii, and despite a shoestring budget, millions of new people had gotten the point, and the “Pacific Garbage Patch” started to become something regular people talked about.
Plastiki could almost be considered JUNK 2.0 - or maybe “JUNK meets Biosphere 2.” It is not literally a pile of garbage like JUNK, but rather a demonstration vehicle for certain new materials and concepts, and an odd-looking, thought-provoking centerpiece created to promote the discussion of plastics pollution. Though certainly more finished (and far more expensive) than JUNK, Plastiki is still nearly as much of an improbable craft, and if you're looking for boatbuilding tips, keep looking. It is made to inspire discussion more than it is made to cross the Pacific, and if that discussion begins with “What do those clowns think they're doing?” Well, that works just fine.
For example, one of the much-touted materials used in the creation of Plastiki is called Self-Reinforced PET (SRPET). Where fiberglass (FRP) uses glass fibers to reinforce a plastic (polyester resin), SRPET is reinforced with plastic fibers from the same type of plastic used to hold it together – it is plastic-reinforced-plastic. Basically, sheets of PET fabric (fundamentally Dacron sailcloth) are bonded together under heat and pressure to make rigid panels. The benefit is that these panels can be recycled as a whole, and fiberglass cannot (Please note, though, that this SRPET is a recyclable building material, not a recycled one).
Plastiki uses larger SRPET panels in its construction than have ever been employed. The boat likely could have been made to look and perform much like a plywood boat with this material, but again, this isn't a boat, it is a publicity stunt. So, instead of making a vessel that looked somewhat normal, and which didn't attract attention and speculation, the team used a cutaway design so that thousands of PET soda bottles could be the focal point of each pontoon (also resulting in the soda bottles being what's floating the boat). Slower and infinitely less safe and reliable than it could have been, but much more likely to start a conversation.
The Plastiki Paradox
And that brings us right back to the real issue, and the one that seems to be causing the conflict: David de Rothschild and crew could just sail a much more seaworthy boat across the Pacific, and still wrap themselves in the eco-warrior banner like so many others have done, but they're not. Instead, they're very happily opening themselves up to ridicule and serious discomfort by setting out to cross the Pacific, on a monstrosity which, according to her crew, won't sail to weather, make decent speed, or even look good at dock. As Thor's grandson Olav Heyerdahl was quick to point out when YachtPals spoke with him, Kon-Tiki ended its voyage crashing onto a reef, which was bad for the boat, but good for the story!
So, is Plastiki “bullshit,” as others have said? Yes and no. If you expect this to be a voyage of discovery that will provide substantial insight regarding ecological boat design, or offer important new data on the state of the oceans, you will likely be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you hope that this huge amount of hype, the freakish craft, and the not-accidentally photogenic crew will bring more attention to the plastic pollution issue than a boat load of scientific papers and a year's worth of environmental demonstrations, then your wish may very well come true. It won't change the world on its own, but it may well get more people than a few environmentalists and the blue water boaters finally talking about “that plastic problem out in the oceans,” and that's a good thing.
Stay Tuned
We plan to have more on Plastiki – the project, the boat, and the crew – as they sail across the Pacific. We'll also look at some of the other technologies employed in the boat – many of which have been speculated upon by cruisers for years (like the Gilligan's Island-style pedal-powered generator). And beside talking with the admittedly non-scientific (though determined) members of the Plastiki team, we'll also get into the subject with some of the most respected experts and researchers currently working on the problem of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, all of whom have thus far told us that they support the project for the exact reason we do: Plastiki, it's crew, and their antics both in-shore and off, are a good way to get the conversation started, and sometimes that's the most difficult step on the road to a solution.
Couresty of Brad Hampton for YachtPals.com
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