A boat made from 12,500 plastic bottles will leave New Caledonia for Sydney this week on the final leg of a voyage across the Pacific to raise environmental awareness, organizers said yesterday.
The Plastiki, inspired by the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft expedition, has already sailed 6,944 nautical miles (12,860km) in 108 days from San Francisco to the French Pacific territory, via the Line Islands and Western Samoa.
Mission statement
The voyage, to highlight the dangers of plastic pollution, over-fishing and climate change to the world’s oceans, is expected to start its last and most challenging leg today after arriving in New Caledonia last week.
“It looks like tomorrow they will be leaving,” a spokeswoman said. “They just watch the weather patterns basically, and plan their journey around the weather patterns so that’s why they’re leaving tomorrow, good sailing conditions [are forecast].”
British adventurer and ecologist David de Rothschild, the youngest heir to Britain’s Rothschild family banking fortune, dreamed up the idea of a fully recyclable performing vessel after reading a UN report on ocean ecosystems.
He said it was partly inspired by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s trans-Pacific Kon-Tiki expedition from South America to Polynesia on a raft made from carved-out balsa husks.
The Plastiki’s bottles are packed together in a “pomegranate-like” structure and fixed to pontoons, giving the catamaran 68 percent of its buoyancy, and it uses fully renewable energy sources including solar, wind and sea turbines.
It is held together with a fully recyclable plastic called Seretex and an organic glue made from cashew nut husks and sugarcane, while its sails are also made from recycled plastic.
Challenging journey
The Plastiki has already stopped in the Line Islands and Western Samoa and its final stretch to Sydney, estimated to take about 10 days, will be its most challenging, the spokeswoman said.
“The Plastiki crew hope to inspire the world to reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink and ultimately refuse our use of wasteful disposable plastics such as bags, styrene foam and bottles,” she said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not