One of the devices the older folks employed to engage our imagination as children was to imagine going to the beach and finding a bottle with a piece of paper inside. We would be challenged to open the bottle, extract the paper, unfold it and read the message which had come from some distant land and washed ashore after so many days. That’s also been a metaphor for all kinds of philosophical discussions and dissertations, and has formed the backbone of many a literary story, poem or feature movie. The standard theme is that the person finding the message would go to great lengths to discover who had sent it and make contact with them.

This week, something of that nature occurred, only in real life. Scenic and spectacular Sydney Harbour in Australia, with the instantly recognisable opera house and bridge, welcomed 10 adventurers who had travelled four months across the Pacific Ocean aboard a vessel made mostly of 12,500 soft drink bottles. You know, the two-litre plastic monsters containing anything from cola and ginger ale to grapefruit drink or jazzed-up coconut water. And those bottles did, indeed, contain a message – that we have to figure out how to enjoy a modern, sophisticated lifestyle while doing minimum damage to the planet that is home to six billion of us.

For 130 days, the aptly named Plastiki traversed the world’s biggest ocean, propelled by the wind and fuelled by the sun. The Plastiki would never be seen in any of the prominent ocean races which feature sleek computer-designed sailing vessels with hulls made from high-tech materials and crewed by enthusiasts intent on winning trophies. It is a truly ungainly raft and very difficult to manoeuvre, but it nevertheless made it across the world’s largest ocean, baked by the relentless sun, battered by storms and squalls and using all the latest electronic devices to keep in touch with supporters and the curious round the world.

As it made its triumphant entry into Sydney Harbour, the expedition leader, David de Rothschild, remarked, “This is the hardest part of the journey so far – getting it in!” Then the crew wrestled the recalcitrant craft into its mooring outside the Australian National Maritime Museum. That’s where it will spend the next month on display before the organisers decide what next to do with the remarkable craft. They had originally intended to recycle it but now lean towards putting it on permanent display at some appropriate location.

Plastiki is the brainchild of de Rothschild, 31-year-old descendant of a prominent British banking family who some years ago founded a company called Adventure Ecology. He says he got the idea after reading a United Nations report four years ago which said that pollution, particularly from discarded plastic, is threatening the world’s oceans. He concluded that the best way to bring this to the world’s notice was to make a vessel from discarded plastic and sail it across the vast reaches of the Pacific.

The name combines our modern plastic world with a tilt of the hat to another famous craft which traversed the Pacific from east to west 63 years ago. That was the Kon-Tiki, nine huge balsa logs lashed together into a raft similar to what ancient migrants used to travel from South America to islands far to the west. It was put together under the leadership of a Norwegian anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl, who conducted several similar expeditions in other parts of the world. And among Plastiki’s crew was Olav Heyerdahl, team diver and grandson of the famous adventurer.

Plastiki is an 18-metre-long catamaran – a vessel with two hulls. This gives it stability in the roughest of seas, and on this voyage it weathered a storm with winds of more than 110 kilometres an hour and swells of 10 metres. The storm was so intense that the crew feared that the mast, made from recycled aluminium irrigation pipe, would not survive intact. Thankfully, it did. The 12,500 bottles are held in a framework of other kinds of recycled plastic, stuck together with glue made from cashew shells and sugar cane. The cabin, made of geodesic-shaped panels a mere 4.5 by six metres, provided cramped shelter for the crew of one woman and five men plus four other men along to record the voyage for television and magazines. They took salt water showers and ate mostly canned and dried food, supplemented occasionally by vegetables grown on a small hydroponic garden. Their computers, radios and satellite connections were powered by windmills, solar panels and generators towed behind the boat or turned by pedals.

The lone woman, Briton Jo Royle, was the captain. She is one of Europe’s leading female ocean yacht skippers whose extensive experiences have taken her from Iceland to the Antarctic. Not all of the 10 were on board for the whole trip – some came on as late as the last 17 days, in order to witness and record the dramatic end of the history-making expedition.

On its voyage Plastiki passed through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a stretch of water some estimate to be the size of the US state of Texas. It is a patch of sluggish water encircled by a huge current which maroons millions of pieces of floating garbage, mostly plastic. This giant garbage dump floating just below the surface is extremely detrimental to the animals which either live in the area or pass through it. Sea birds pick up small pieces of plastic thinking they are sea creatures, while marine mammals and turtles ingest plastic bags which they mistake for jellyfish or pick up as by-catch while grabbing other prey. Tiny pieces of plastic embed themselves in these creatures as well as fish which filter enormous quantities of water while eating and breathing.

In their continuous stream of internet diaries, the team emphasised this by pointing out that since the voyage began, almost 8.7 billion plastic bottles had been used and disposed of in the United States alone – enough to build almost 700,000 Plastikis!

While there remains considerable disagreement about whether human activity causes global warming, there is no question about the effect of all the garbage we dump unthinkingly. That is the lesson de Rothschild, Royle and all the others want us to learn from their Plastiki exercise. They agree it would be totally impractical for us to completely stop using plastic, but urge us to end stupid and enormously wasteful practices such as buying a jerk-chicken dinner and soft drink in plastic containers and throw them away after one use, or wrap vegetables in plastic film which we chuck in the rubbish as soon as we get home. They want us to start looking at the stuff we throw out as a source of raw materials for new products. In de Rothschild’s words, “We have to re-think waste as a resource.”

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca