Eideard

The Plastiki, a boat made of bottles that set sail from San Francisco in March, glided past the Sydney Opera House at midday local time Monday in a grand finale to a voyage intended to highlight the problem of plastic waste.

“Overwhelmed! Wow! Need to breathe. Wow! Wow! Wow!” read one of the final tweets from the boat, whose buoyancy relied on the 12,500 plastic bottles encased in its hull…

Underlining the vessel’s mission, Plastiki estimated at its Web site that 8.7 billion plastic bottles, give or take, had been used in the United States since it set out…

Wearing a pink cap and a mariner’s full beard, the leader of the expedition, David de Rothschild, 31, strode up the dock at Darling Harbor to a welcoming ceremony that included the American ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich. “The journey of the Plastiki is a journey from trash to triumph,” Mr. Bleich said, in a nod both to the boat’s recycled nature and its path through a large garbage patch in the Pacific.

We posted on the start of this adventure back in March. We can stop worrying about the voyagers, finally.

And return to worrying about what we all do to this small planet.

The Plastiki, a boat with a hull built of 12,500 plastic bottles, set sail from a Sausalito yacht harbor this morning 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.

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.

Bon voyage, folks. It ain’t ever easy with a craft this small.

Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles through treacherous seas.

You’d have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point.

De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic.

“It’s all sail power,” he said. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish.”

De Rothschild’s vessel, scheduled to set sail from San Francisco in April, is called the Plastiki. Its name is an homage of sorts to Thor Heyerdahl, the fabled Norwegian explorer who in 1947 sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific on the Kon-Tiki, a raft made from balsa wood.

RTFA. Recycling plastic is a trip in and of itself. Building trades use 2×4′s made from recycled plastic and wall modules that used to be styrofoam cups. One of our shopping bags used to be plastic bottles.

The homage to Thor Heyerdahl is fitting for folks who don’t mind living parts of their lives in simpler, more traditional fashion. Especially when just a little bit of cyberhardware makes it possible.