Sausalito (Global Adventures): A group of adventurers and environmentalists did set sail to cross the Pacific Ocean on a boat built out of 12,500 two-liter plastic bottles. During the three month trip from San Francisco to Sydney, the group hopes to draw attention to the health of the oceans. The 11,000-nautical mile journey will bring them close to Hawaii, the Bikini Atoll, and the Tarawa Islands. Its course will follow the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where swimming plastic covers an area twice the size of the US state of Texas.

The hull of the boat, called Plastiki, is made entirely out of recycled plastic bottles filled with carbon dioxide. Almost everything on the boat from the hull to the sails is made from recycled materials. Power is generated by solar panels, wind and sea turbines. The 60-foot long catamaran has an on-board exercise bike to provide extra power for electronics, including a laptop.

The ship is the brainchild of David de Rothschild, an environmental storyteller who crossed Antarctica and the Greenland Icecap. The British adventurer is head of Adventures Ecology, a venture trying to raise awareness about climate change.

David de Rothschild and a crew of 6 started planning to sail across the Pacific after being inspired Thor Heyerdahl’s epic expedition, the Kon-Tiki. Their goal is to show that plastic waste can be transformed into a valuable resource and reused again. "We’re needlessly losing millions of seabirds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals from ingesting plastic every year," de Rothschild told ABC News. "I decided to take this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem and build a boat out of the very items that we were seeing ending up in our natural environment."

The Plastiki was built on the San Francisco waterfront in 2009 and has finished several trial voyages on the Bay. "And we are off. The expedition begins," said its creator Rothschild on Twitter, as the boat set sail from the town of Sausalito, California. A website providing updates on the voyage can be accessed here.

Photo: Global Adventures, LLC

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