Think twice when you are about to recycle (we can’t think of throwing it away at all) your plastic bottle. If you gather 12,500 you can reuse them building up your own boat and then travel around the world on it. This is not a joke, is what David de Rothschild did.

Six people were on board of Plastiki, a boat completely made of discarded plastic bottles that departed from San Francisco 4 months ago with destination to Sydney, Australia. This valiant adventure attempted to call attention to the issues of waste and pollution by sailing right through the Pacific Gyre garbage patch, a great mass of garbage concentrated by currents in the Pacific ocean.

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Unfortunately, people from all over the world throw plastic wastes without even thinking where they will end up going. Oceans are filled with floating garbage islands, and they grow bigger every passing day.

But here´s the good news: Electrolux wants to gather plastic from the polluted Pacific Ocean, and turn it into vacuum cleaners.

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Jack Johnson is a world famous musician, that unlike many others has a passion for environmentalism. He keeps it green not only in his daily life, but he also makes sure all of his concerts are as green as possible.

The Kokua Festival in Hawaii, organized by Johnson himself, features Johnson and his band as the headline act, attracts 20,000 concert-goers over two nights. The environmental message is everywhere, even before fans make it through the gates. Posters and signs encouraging bike-riding, using renewable energy and overall protecting and respecting the environment are to be found wherever you look. There is even a bicycle valet-parking enclosure outside the Waikiki Shell, an outdoor auditorium on the outskirts of Honolulu where the festival takes place.

Kokua means help, as soon as you arrive at the auditorium gates you find more posters which set the “greening principles” for the event. Plastic water bottles are banned, sustainable biodiesel and biodegradable food utensils are used, the whole festival aims for zero waste. The money raised goes to a range of island-wide non-profit organizations, the Kokua Foundation’s stall is situated alongside representatives from the Hawaii Farmers’ Union, the Surfrider Foundation and the Liquid Aloha Brewery (‘coming soon: sun-powered beer’). Johnson’s non-profit foundation supports environmental education in schools and communities in the islands.

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We are all attentive to the results of the FIFA World Cup, how our teams are doing in the match and making our own predictions of what future outcomes will be. But there is more to the 2010 tournament than just sport. This year many green innovations have been made revolving around this event. As we have mentioned in a previous post, the Moses Mabhida Stadium, where some of the semi final matches are to be played, is eco-friendly. But this incredible structure is not the only green gadget that we’ll be seeing as the tournament is played.

This month a new green-spirited product will be featured in South Africa. Nike has created jerseys for FIFA’s top stars from recycled plastic water bottles. The manufacturer announced that some of the leading players that will be wearing these environmentally-friendly jerseys include Cristiano Ronaldo, Robinho and Ji-Sung Park.

Not only are these individual players going to be dressed in recycled material, in addition countries such as Brazil, the Netherlands, Portugal, United States, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Serbia and Slovenia will be dressed in plastic as well. Going Green seems to have been an important concept at this years FIFA World Cup, since many participants are joining in to encourage recycling by wearing these jerseys.

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Coca-Cola has teamed up with design firm Emeco to create a new fate for the millions of plastic coke bottles that are normally thrown away. The construction of the new “111 Navy Chair” will use at least 111 former coke bottles, or 60% PET plastic (recycled polyethylene terephthalate plastic), along with pigment and glass fiber for strength. The classic design of the chair was originally created for the U.S. Navy in 1944. The 111 Navy Chair will be available for purchase next month.

Gregg Buchbinder, the Chairman of Emeco explains:

When Coke came to me with this project I jumped on it. It’s a huge investment for a small company, but we have the potential of reusing the PET from about 3 million plastic bottles a year. That’s a lot of bottles and a lot of chairs too. The new chair is the strongest, and most beautiful we can make. We’ve turned something you throw away into something you want and can keep for a long, long time.

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Check out Annie Leonard’s analysis of bottled water. It’s not tastier, not even cleaner or healthier than most tap water, so why do we keep consuming it?

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The Welsh company Affresol offers an alternative building material: recycled plastic. By doing so, the amount of waste sent to landfills is reduced, and the usage of new building materials is avoided. Affresol transforms plastics into a very strong material called Thermo Poly Rock (TPR), through a patented process.

There are two main types of houses Affresol erects. Regular ones will use around 18 tons of recycled plastic, whereas modular homes will use about four tons. The main target for whom the houses are designed are low-income families. In the meantime, the modular buildings can be used as classrooms, offices, showrooms, storage and construction site offices.

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David De Rothschild is a British 31-year-old banking heir, who in the last couple of years has been developing a number of environmental initiatives. He has now built –after months of hard work, research, and unrevealed, probably large investments– a catamaran made of recycled soda bottles, called Plastiki. He plans to cross the Pacific Ocean on it, hopefully setting sail in March.

De Rothschild’s goal is to show people what can be done with our trash, and what happens when we don’t deal with it. That’s why the Plastiki will visit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I can picture the two opposites: the fantastic recycled-plastic boat and the huge pile of trash that is contaminating our waters. It’s up to us to stop that pile from growing, and start finding witty ways of re-cycling and up-cycling our waste.

The name Plastiki was inspired by the journey of Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed from South America to Polynesia on the Kon-Tiki.

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Education and the mass media are two of the possible tools for trying to talk people into recycling. However, they are often not enough. That’s when legislation comes in, forcing people to act in more sustainable ways. This is the case of the North Carolina House Bill 1465, which forbids sending plastic bottles and aluminum cans to landfills, among others.

It may be discouraging to think that only a law can change human behavior. We who work in organizations that try to foster more eco-friendly ways of living can be led to ask ourselves whether informing readers is worth it. I still think it is.

Laws are generally the result of human evolution. Though maybe an extreme example, slavery was legal until people’s minds started to change, and they began to see it as something immoral. That’s when a law that declared slavery illegal came around.

So, coming back to North Carolina and its banning of not recycling bottles and cans, I think this is the result of a generalized progress in our conception of waste. A few years ago, bottles were just dumped without anyone worrying about it. After years of this risky carelessness, we are coming to realize that a change is needed.

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‘Do you have your own bag?’, the ‘Giant’ supermarket attendant asked me the other day.

Starting January 1^st, 2010, businesses in Washington D.C. selling food or alcohol have to charge 5 cents for every disposable paper or plastic carryout bag. Now, that might not seem like a lot but getting charged for plastic bags makes us consider costs we sometimes forget about. Plastic takes so long to degrade naturally that it can have a strong negative impact on the environment. By charging the customer, supermarkets such as Giant force us to consider these costs.

Save one or two, most of the customer’s I’ve seen while shopping seem to respond favourably. I heard one man say, ‘I can’t believe they’re charging us…but I guess it’s for a good reason.” The response was even better while the 250,000 reusable bags that were handed out free were still available. Now most people just accept that they will have to get used to the change and slowly but surely they are.

The charge has a double purpose as most of it is also used to fund the Anacostia River Protection Fund which is administered by the District Department of the Environment (DDOE). The rest is given to the businesses that offer a rebate when customers bring their own bag.

This is a small practical step but a strong and positive psychological one. Let’s hope it is one of many.

Source: Green DC

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Plastic is not biodegradable. It can take hundreds of years for the sun and other agents of nature to degrade it. Because of this, environmentalists dream of abandoning plastic or creating a biodegradable plastic. Now it appears that a 16-year-old student has managed to create plastic bags that biodegrade in just three days.

This is no joke. We’ve already talked here on Sustentator about how plastic accumulates around the world, such as in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Every year millions of tons of plastic are produced, and it may take up to 1,000 years for it to decompose. Meanwhile, plastic kills thousands of animals all over the world that eat it or become entangled in packaging materials.

Daniel Burd, a Canadian teenager, presented his science project at the Canada-wide Science Fair in Ottawa. His invention won many prizes, including $10,000 and a $20,000 scholarship.

Daniel, who is 16 years old, got his environmental idea from everyday life. He said: “Every week I have to do my chores at home, and when I open the closet door, there is an avalanche of plastic bags. One day I just got tired of it, and I decided to find out what everyone else did with their plastic bags.” The answer was nothing. So he decided to do something.

Plastic is not biodegradable, or rather, it is not degraded by bacteria as other materials are, but instead degrades very slowly in almost the same way as a rock does. Daniel knew that plastic would end up degrading eventually, but he had to accelerate this degradation. That’s why he started studying microorganisms that could degrade plastic.

He did an experiment that lasted for months, testing which microbes were capable of degrading plastic. Finally, he was able to identify four types of microbes that were able to partially degrade a common plastic bag.

Then he mixed the various microbes that eat plastic and found that they helped each other to reproduce or degrade the plastic. The two winning bacteria are sphingomonas and their helper pseudomonas.

It’s important to realize that we’re talking about a schoolboy who was able to achieve this using high school equipment, something that many researchers all over the world with the best equipment have not achieved, or have not wanted to achieve.

The result is that Daniel discovered that plastic can be biodegradable, with human assistance. An industrial application of Daniel’s homemade method would be cheap. And it would be using nature to solve one of the greatest problems of humanity – plastic garbage that accumulates by the tons on the Earth and in the water.

Source: The Record

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