Saturday, 20 March 2010. San Francisco, Pier 31. A strange expedition weighs anchor. Objective: traverse more than 11,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean, from California to Sydney, on a catamaran made from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles. On board, a platinum blond skipper, a nephew of Rothschild bankers, a nephew of the great explorer Thor Heyerdal who, in 1947, borrowed the Kon-Tiki, built of balsa wood and cane, to cross the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia to prove that the inhabitants of these islands came from Latin America. In honour of that historic expedition, these young men named the catamaran Plastiki. But, they are neither anthropologists nor scientists, they are just young people of today who want to raise public awareness of the problem of pollution that plastic causes. They intend skirting the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge cluster of trash and plastic which, carried and dragged by slow but relentless swirling currents, finally formed "a hidden island", an Escondida of waste that the sea can break, fragment, and erode, but never manages to destroy. According to experts, this island that escapes radar would have a surface twice the size of Texas.
Marco Steiner, 'Voyage around the dream'
