Boat made of plastic bottles completes Pacific tour

LONDON - The Plastiki, a boat made out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles, completed its tour after it docked at the Sydney Harbour.

The boat spent four difficult months crossing the Pacific Ocean on a journey that was meant to raise awareness about the perils of plastic waste.

The crew of the Plastiki, a 60 feet catamaran, which weathered fierce storms during its 8,000 nautical miles at sea, left San Francisco on March 20, 2010.

Plastiki stopped at various South Pacific island nations including Kiribati and Samoa along the way.

“This is the hardest part of the journey so far - getting it in,” the Daily Express quoted expedition leader David de Rothschild as saying.

“It has been an extraordinary adventure,” said Rothschild.

The 31-year-old said that the idea for the journey came to his mind after he read a United Nations report in 2006, which said that pollution - and particularly plastic waste - was seriously threatening the world’s oceans, reports The Daily Express.

He decided to prove that rubbish can be effectively recycled was to use some of it to build a boat.

The Plastiki, named after the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft, sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl is fully recyclable and gets its power from solar panels and windmills.

The boat is almost entirely made up of bottles, which are held together with organic glue made from sugar cane and cashews, but includes other materials too.

The mast, for instance, is recycled aluminium irrigation pipe. (ANI)