Recycled-Plastic Boat to Sail the Pacific; Somali Pirates Unimpressed

Three sailors and a scientist are getting ready to sail 11,000 miles across the Pacific...on a boat made entirely of recycled plastic bottles. Sounds like the opening of a bad joke, but the 60-foot catamaran is currently being constructed from more than 12,000 plastic bottles on a San Francisco pier. Each of the bottles has been pressurized with dry ice powder, which sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and makes the bottles rigid enough to withstand the endless seas. The vessel, dubbed The Plastiki, will be launched in April and is expected to take more than 100 days to reach Sydney, stopping in Hawaii, Tuvalu, and Fiji along the way. The permanent crew members will be able to sleep in the watertight cabin made from recycled PET, and the passengers will rotate in throughout the voyage. The man behind the project, David de Rothschild, says the objective is to spread a ...