A REPORTER AT LARGE about banking heir David de Rothschild’s
plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean on a “bottle boat” made
entirely of recycled materials. A highlight of the trip will be
a visit to a region of floating plastic trash and particles
known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. De Rothschild and his team
will collect water samples to study and, using a satellite
phone, post photographs and video clips on the Web site of
Adventure Ecology, an environmental organization that he
founded. His goal is to call attention to the perils of ocean
polluting and to suggest a solution: waste as a resource. The
expedition is expected to cost several million dollars, much of
which he has raised from corporate partners. Inspired, in part,
by Thor Heyerdahl’s Pacific crossing, in 1947, on a raft called
the Kon-Tiki, de Rothschild dubbed the project Plastiki.
Describes the building on San Francisco’s Pier 31 where de
Rothschild and his team are assembling their boat and the many
difficulties they have faced in its design a