Green Blog
14 April 2011
Kon-Tiki, Plastiki, our reliance on plastic is freaky
I've just finished reading Plastiki by David de Rothschild - an account of the epic building and journey across the Pacific of a catamaran made of 12,500 plastic bottles to raise awareness of the plastic that is choking our seas.
If like me you've ever sailed across an ocean much of this book will resonate. In fact it will make you want to leap out of your seat and get back on the water again.
If you haven't, you might just be inspired to try it out - but best do it soon before the oceans disappear beneath the debris we chuck in them.
I learned that the plastic accumulation zones, or garbage gyres - the places all that rubbish gathers - in our oceans cover 25% of the Earth's surface. It's shocking, almost incomprehensible. And I thought I knew a fair amount about the subject. This book constantly taught me new things.
Yet it's not all about plastic and sailing. There's a little bit of everything: pomegranates, whale turds and even the birth of a baby, which the proud first-time father viewed from the boat by satellite.
David repeatedly alludes to his motto in life "Nobody is as smart as everybody". The book lives up to this motto with first-hand accounts from David and the crew of Plastiki as well as inspirational contributions from experts in all things environmental and oceanic.
You get the feeling David wouldn't waste a single day of his life - let alone a single plastic bottle. And I think it's his energy and enthusiasm that make this book such a success. To be able to tell such a devastating story, lay down such intensely depressing facts without making you want to give up - but rather do something about it - is indeed an achievement.
Being a sailor myself and having long harassed anyone I have sailed with to take better care of the seas on which we rely, I'll be urging most people I know to read this book.
Amelia Collins, Creative Communications team
© Luca Babini, courtesy of Plastiki
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