Message In A Bottle

Explorer David de Rothschild promotes ocean cleanup on a plastic-bottle raft

Given the choice, you probably wouldn't risk sailing 11,500 miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat handmade of 20,000 plastic water bottles. But David de Rothschild, the founder of the nonprofit educational organization Adventure Ecology, sees such a vessel as the perfect way to "beat waste" by promoting new uses for recycled plastic while dramatizing the problem of ocean debris. Next month, de Rothschild and a crew of scientists will sail the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran, to environmental hotspots including Bikini Atoll, the former atomic-bomb testing site, and Tuvalu, an island rapidly disappearing under rising seas. He will also swing by the northern reaches of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Canada-size, 100-million-ton accumulation of mostly plastic refuse trapped in a vortex of ocean currents in the middle of the Pacific. This toxic stew, made up of everything from decomposing Lego blocks to supermarket bags, kills more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals a year. We talked to de Rothschild about coming face-to-face with the refuse and his plan to help clean it up.