Soup of the day

AUSTRALIA: A ship made out of 12,500 plastic bottles has completed its four-month journey from California to Australia. The leader of the project and expedition is David de Rothschild of the famous banking family.

With the journey, Rothschild hopes to raise awareness of pollution in the world’s oceans, and draw attention to the problem of plastic waste. The Plastiki is partly inspired by the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, which sailed from South America to Polynesia on a simple raft, to prove that people in pre-Columbian times could have crossed the Pacific from South America to settle the islands.

In contrast, the Plastiki was highly engineered over months. In making the ship, designers packed the bottles tightly together like the tiny seeds of a pomegranate. The bottles provide buoyancy and are fastened to the hull, which is made mainly of recycled plastics and organic materials.

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" contains millions and millions of pieces of plastic floating in the water.

The Plastiki set sail from San Francisco in late March. En route to Australia, Rotschild sailed through the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, an area containing perhaps 100 million tonnes of waste, at the North Pacific Gyre where several ocean currents come together. What he saw was worse than he had expected. “It is all like a soup, millions and millions of tiny fragments of plastic, suspended in the water," Rothschild told The Guardian. “The red fragments stand out most clearly.”

The waste is not only ugly, it presents a danger to fish and other sea creatures, which can tangled in plastic or swallow pieces of it. Rothschild and his crew arrived in Sydney on 26 July. Watch Rothschild's arrival: