Below Belief

Sailboat made using 12,500 recycled plastic bottles reaches Australia after four-month voyage to highlight recycling and marine litter • How it all began
• Interview: David de Rothschild

A sailboat largely constructed from 12,500 recycled plastic bottles docked in Sydney harbour on Monday, after four difficult months crossing the Pacific Ocean in a bid to raise awareness about the perils of plastic waste.

The crew of the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran that weathered fierce ocean storms during its 8,000 nautical-mile journey, left San Francisco on March 20, stopping along the way at various South Pacific island nations including Kiribati and Samoa.

“This is the hardest part of the journey so far – getting it in!” expedition leader David de Rothschild yelled from the boat as the crew struggled to manoeuvre the tough-to-steer vessel into port outside the Australian National Maritime Museum.

De Rothschild, a descendant of the well-known British banking family, said: “It has been an extraordinary adventure.”

De Rothschild, 31, said the idea for the journey came to him after he read a United Nations report in 2006 that revealed how plastic waste was seriously threatening the world’s oceans, and considered that recycling plastic to build a boat could highlight the problem – and a solution. The Plastiki, named after the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, is fully recyclable and is powered by solar panels and wind turbines.

The boat is almost entirely made up of bottles, which are held together with an organic glue made of sugar cane and cashews, but includes other materials too. The mast, for instance, is a recycled aluminum irrigation pipe.

According to the UN Environment Programme, more than 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are now floating on every square kilometre of the world’s oceans. Around 8m items of marine litter are thought to enter the oceans and seas every day, about 5m (63%) of which are solid waste thrown overboard or lost from ships. 100,000 turtles and marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales and seals, are killed by plastic marine litter every year around the world.

“The journey of the Plastiki is a journey from trash to triumph,” said Jeffrey Bleich, the US ambassador to Australia, who greeted the team after they docked.

During their 128-day journey, the six-member crew lived in a cabin of just 20 feet by 15 feet (6 meters by 4.5 meters), took saltwater showers, and survived on a diet of dehydrated and canned food, supplemented with the occasional vegetable from their small on-board garden.

Along the way, they fought giant ocean swells, 62-knot (70mph) winds, temperatures up to 38C and torn sails. The crew briefly stopped in Queensland last week, after battling a brutal storm off the Australian coast.

Skipper Jo Royle also had the particular challenge of being the only woman on board. “I’m definitely looking forward to a glass of wine and a giggle with my girlfriends,” she said.

Vern Moen, the Plastiki’s filmmaker, missed the birth of his first child though he managed to watch the delivery on a grainy Skype connection. He met his son for the first time after docking in Sydney. “It was very, very surreal to show up on a dock and it’s like, ‘Here’s your kid,” he said.

Although the team had originally hoped to recycle the Plastiki, de Rothschild said they are now thinking of keeping it intact, and using it as a way of enlightening people to the power of recycling.

“There were many times when people looked at us and said: ‘You’re crazy,’” de Rothschild said. “I think it drove us on to say: ‘Anything’s possible.’”

Recycling
Waste
Oceans
Plastic bags
Pollution

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Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley doesn’t need you and your stupid dead trees! And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels! But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these). As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.” Yeah! Except, no. Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. A couple of years ago I decided to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my over-priced apartment in London and instead live permanently in hotels – in San Francisco, or wherever in the world I find myself in any given month. I’ve just finished writing a book about hotel living. In the past thirty years I’ve stayed in hundreds – thousands? – of hotels. Some have been amazingly opulent, some adequate, some dreadful, some absolute flea-pit shit holes by the side of highways in Dallas. But every one of them has been licensed to operate as a hotel. Why? Because I don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong. Call me old-fashioned. In New York, as in many major cities, there is a serious problem with transient hotels. Slum landlords know that even the most scummy city apartment – $500 a month stuff – can deliver that same amount per day simply by packing the place with bunk beds and advertising it on Craigslist or any one of the plethora of foreign language NYC hotel sites as a travelers’ hotel. Not only does this put guests at risk due to a lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety, while causing a living hell of noise and violence and shady goings on for the owners of adjacent apartments – but, given that New York apartment vacancy rates are hovering around 1% (against an 8% national average), it also makes it harder for families to find somewhere else to live when they’re forced out by drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves. And yet, despite all of these sound reasons for outlawing faux-tels, it seems that some people would rather let a Spaniard burn to death, or a family be left homeless, than allow The Man to impede the rise of AirFuckingBnB. Says the opening para of this post by one Sean O’Neill, writing on Newsweek’s budget travel blog “Hundreds of New Yorkers, like others nationwide, have been making a few extra dollars by using sites such as AirBnB, Crashpadder, Roomorama, and Craigslist to sublet pullout sofas, living rooms, and whole apartments. But that may end soon. This week, New York state senators vote on a bill that would make it illegal for any homeowner or renter to sublet for less than a month.” And says Joe Gebbia, president of AirBnB.com “We have received over 300 letters from New Yorkers who depend on renting by the night to make ends meet. As everyone knows, NYC is financially a challenging place to live – especially in a down economy. The consequences of this generalised bill will negatively impact thousands of New Yorkers more than by the small number of illegal hotels’.” Yeah, Joe. Screw the small number of “illegal hotels” and the untold misery they cause. Hipsters in peril – that’s the big story here. Except it’s really not. For a start, there’s an explicit exemption in the bill that allows for the letting of rooms in private dwellings if the owner is present (as is often the case in AirBnB lets). And for other lets (absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money) State Senator Liz Krueger who sponsored the bill has made it clear that “the city is not going to knock on doors,”; AirBnB users will only fall foul of the law if their neighbours complain. Which they’re perfectly entitled to do. And yet, commentators like Masnick and O’Neill and entrepreneurs like Gebbia are so enraptured by the cult of “Disruption” – that any use of the Internet to circumvent the traditional way of doing things is inherently good – that they can’t help but see the new law as The Man standing in the way of Progress. Or as Masnick puts it “the hotels, which have their high prices and don’t like the competition.” They simply can’t contemplate the heretical idea that sometimes The Man is right, and that some of his laws are created for good reason. That not everyone on the Internet is a Gawker-reading, fixie riding hipster who just wants to share his space with weary travelers for a few bucks extra pot money. That some people on Craigslist are criminals. That sometimes legislation is needed to protect innocent people from those criminals, even if it stops the rest of us us doing precisely what we want. And that one of the dictionary definitions of Disrupt is “to interrupt or impede progress”, rather than the opposite. Blogs disrupting newspapers is great, except when no-one can be held accountable for gross inaccuracies and libels. Online pharmacies disrupting doctors is great until someone is poisoned by Indian viagra’. And advertising rooms on the Internet without legal safeguards is great until the platform is used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments and fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs. If AirBnB et al are so smart then they’ll figure out a way to thrive in New York’s new legislative environment. These are, after all, disruptive times. But if they can’t understand the fact that disruption cuts both ways, and that the rights of Internet folk to create awesome new business models doesn’t trump a city’s right to disrupt criminality,  then it’s time for them – not the hotels industry or legislators – to get out of the way. Young man. CrunchBase Information

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