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Plastiki Rendering

This summer, David de Rothschild will launch Plastiki.  Plastiki is a boat with a hull made out of plastic bottles.  Rothschild decided to create Plastiki after hearing about how much plastic is swimming around in our oceans.   Both National Geographic Adventure magazine and June's issue Outside Magazine have articles about Plastiki.

His goal is to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  This garbage patch consists of millions of tons of plastic trapped by currents of the North Pacific Gyre.  See this great video from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) by Captain Charles Moore, who discovered this floating tragedy.

Just because this happens to be thousands of miles away from you, don't think it can't affect you.  Plastic that floats in our oceans ends up in our food supply, which eventually ends up in our sushi and fish sticks.  Who doesn't love the taste of Polystyrene anyway?

Whether or not the Plastiki inspires you, it is an honorable undertaking. From their official website:

It is our aim to captivate, inspire and activate tomorrow's environmental thinkers and doers to take positive action for our Planet and to be smart with waste, ultimately we hope to inspire people to rethink waste as a valuable resource. One person's waste could be another person's treasure.

It's very easy to not think about plastic collecting in the middle of nowhere in our oceans.  It's easy not to think about how this plastic is eaten by birds and fish and infiltrating our ecosystem.  But hopefully that's not why you're reading this.  Hopefully you are tired of just ignoring things that are easy to ignore and you want to start taking action.

So think about how much plastic you use in your daily life, and see what you can do to reduce that and recycle the plastic you do use (but most importantly reduce current use, because plastic isn't easily recyclable).  This problem won't go away overnight, but the efforts of de Rothschild, Charles Moore, and you will eventually help right this wrong.