A boat made of bottles
How did the Plastiki begin?
One day, the environmentalist David De Rothschild was reading some information about all the plastic in the seas and oceans. He couldn’t believe what he was reading. For example, humans throw away (63) four out of every five plastic bottles they use and plastic rubbish causes (64) about eighty per cent of the pollution in the sea. Soon afterwards, Rothschild decided that he wanted to help the fight against pollution in the sea. To create publicity for the problem, he started building a boat made of plastic bottles. He called it ‘the Plastiki’. This environmentally-friendly boat is made of (65) twelve thousand five hundred reclaimed plastic bottles.
De Rothschild sailed the Plastiki across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney. That’s (66) fifteen thousand three hundred and seventy two nautical kilometres. The whole journey took (67) one hundred and twenty nine days. Originally, De Rothschild thought the boat could only travel once but it survived so well that he is planning to sail it again one day.