Source: Huffington Post - San Francisco group Adventure Ecology took recycled materials to another level when they built the Plastiki, a durable ship kept afloat by recycled plastic bottles, ABC's Laura Marquez reported.
The group, spearheaded by David de Rothschild, used 12,000 bottles filled with carbon dioxide to construct the durable ship, and everything from the sail to the mast is made from plastic materials as well. The crew plans to set sail for a three-month voyage from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, a trip they hope to begin within weeks, Marquez said.
De Rothschild hopes the ship's expedition will bring attention to the global waste problem.
"We're needlessly losing millions of seabirds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals from ingesting plastic every year," de Rothschild told Marquez. "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."
One of the main sights they'll be highlighting along their voyage will be Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an unfathomably large stretch of trash that is twice the size of Texas.
WATCH Marquez's report on the Plastiki:
