No legacy is so rich as honesty - William Shakespeare

Ship of (Recycled) Fools

by Hal_10000

Oh, here we go:

Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles through treacherous seas.

You’d have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point.

De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic.

“It’s all sail power,” he said. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish.”

My Greendar started pinging immediately when I saw the headline of this story.  Read through the article and you’ll find out just how much good this literal piece of floating garbage is doing for the environment.

The plastic sailboat is taking shape in an old pier building not far from this city’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf. Here, thousands of two-liter soda bottles are being stripped of their labels, washed, filled with dry-ice powder and then resealed. The dry ice sublimates into carbon dioxide gas and pressurizes the bottle, making it rigid.

The vessel’s twin hulls will be filled with 12,000 to 16,000 bottles. Skin-like panels made from recycled PET, a woven plastic fabric, will cover the hulls and a watertight cabin, which sleeps four.

“This actually is the same material that is made out of bottles,” said de Rothschild of the PET fabric. “We actually wrap the PET fabric over the PET foam and then basically put it under a vacuum, heat it, press it and create these long PET panels. So that means the boat is, technically, one giant bottle.”

OK, twerp.  I’m sure you’re used to fawning press coverage, so you’ve never had to answer these questions.  How much energy is going to making this Puce Goose?  The process you describe is not exactly simple.  It uses a tremendous amount of energy, most of which is coming from fossil fuels.  Is it less energy- and waste-intensive to build your floating pop bottle than to just built a conventional sailboat from steel?  I doubt it.

Ooh, it gets better:

Two wind turbines and an array of solar panels will charge a bank of 12-volt batteries, which will power several onboard laptop computers, a GPS and SAT phone.

Definitely back to nature.  I guess those batteries, solar panels, laptops, GPS and SAT phones grew on trees.  No industry or e-waste there.

But here is my favorite part:

De Rothschild is something of an adventurer himself. The scion of a wealthy British banking family, he is one of only several dozen people to traverse both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. In 2005 he founded Adventure Ecology, an organization that uses field expeditions to call attention to environmental issues.

In other words, he’s a rich kid.  A rich kid burning money to make himself look good while probably doing more harm to the environment.

It doesn’t more green hypocritical than that.

Update: This is usually defended as “consciousness raising”—i.e., OK, yeah, it’s wasteful but he’s bringing attention to an important issue!  Specifically, we learn about the mass of plastic that’s floating in our oceans.  I just don’t see it that way.  How do you raise people’s consciousness with stupid publicity stunts that actually do more harm than good?  Problems aren’t solved by publicity stunts.  They’re solved by long, hard, boring work.  Recycling plastic is of marginal environmental benefit at best.  Making plastic recycling work is going to require a lot of hard boring work by guys in white lab coats.  Getting people to dispose of trash properly is going require a lot of hard boring work by guys in suits.  This stunt isn’t solving the Earth’s problems; this is rich people spending some money to get an undeserved sense of self-righteousness.  It’s “We Are the World” on the high seas.

Comments

Posted by on 03/10/09 at 04:19 AM from

It’s “We Are the World” while punching children.

Fixed it for you.

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