As David de Rothschild told us at the unveiling, ‘the minute we are born, we get a plastic bracelet with our name on it,’ and nearly everything we do after that involves plastic in some way. According to Project Aware, only 1 out of the 15 billion pounds of plastic produced each year in the U.S. gets recycled, and an estimated 38 billion plastic bottles and 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups end up in landfill, annually. Hence the concept of a boat made out of 100% recycled plastic, set to sail through the Pacific Gyre to bring awareness to the problem and inspire change. The boat is, in fact, made up of 12,500 2-liter plastic bottles tied to Self Reinforcing Polyethylene Terephthalate (SRPET), all bound with an innovative organic glue made out of the shells of cashew seeds.
[...] Sydney, Australia this morning! The boat — made from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles — set out on its mission in March from San Francisco to help raise awareness about waste by sailing right through the [...]
[...] 120 days at sea, the Plastiki boat made from plastic bottles has finally reached Australia! David de Rothschild sent a dispatch [...]
I knew someone was going to comment on that! Ocean Now has found that the plastic bottles in the ocean are primarily from land- bottles which have been littered into waste streams and eventually carried out to sea by wind currents. So my comment about that 5th bottle (of the 4 out of 5) ending up in the ocean is figurative, given how much waste is in our oceans. It’s waste in route to landfills that’s filling up the oceans.. so if you want to be precise- it’s part of those 4 out of 5 en route to the landfills that’s reaching the ocean.. but does it matter? Would it matter if 3 out of 5 100% recyclable bottles went in a landfill/water ways instead of the 4 of 5? You can learn more about plastic recycling from the Container Recycling Institute, here: http://www.container-recycling.org/
So it seems there are 6 out of 5 plastic bottles out there. One in the ocean one in the landfill and the other four in the landfill?