Bottled Up

Y
our hotel stays may be never be the same again. Environmentalists in California are trying to create a new law that would put an end to those little bottles of shampoo that hotels give out. They say that those little plastic bottles are ruining the environment, and they want them outlawed, just like plastic straws have been in many places. Meanwhile, some creative people around the world have come up with cool ideas for how to deal with the plastic waste we already have.

Bottle Boats

In July 2010, a catamaran sailed into the Sydney Harbor. It had finally completed a four-month journey, sailing more than 8,000 nautical miles through fierce storms. The catamaran had left San Francisco in March and had traveled around the Eastern Garbage Patch, which is a floating mass of garbage in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas.

But what made this particular boat unique in every which way was that it was made almost entirely of recycled plastic bottles: 12,500 of them, to be exact. Which happens to be the number of bottles discarded by Americans every 8.3 seconds! The vessel was also powered by solar panels and wind turbines, and the glue that held the plastic bottles together was made of organic sugar cane and cashews. Even the mast was recycled. In fact, only 10% of the vessel was not made of recycled material.

The brains behind this expedition was David Mayer de Rothschild, of the famous Rothschild international banking family. He named the boat Plastiki, in tribute to the plastic bottles and to a famous wooden raft, Kon-Tiki, that crossed the Pacific Ocean in 1947.