IT is an unmistakable message in a bottle. David de Rothschild, a British millionaire adventurer and scion of the banking dynasty, is to sail a 60ft raft made from empty mineral water bottles to the centre of the Earth’s plastic sea.

He will set out from San Francisco in April to alert the world to the pollution threat from a massive waste dump known as the great Pacific garbage patch.

A sea of trash five times the size of Britain sits just below the surface between California and Hawaii in a becalmed area of ocean known as the north Pacific gyre. There, plastic waste is deposited in a slowly twisting, soupy mass by the circular pattern of the world’s sea currents.

Rothschild, 30, a 6ft 4in ecologist, has traversed both the Arctic and Antarctic. He is calling his vessel the Plastiki in homage to Kon-Tiki, the timber and hemp raft used by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer and writer, to demonstrate that South American Indians could have settled in Polynesia.

The Plastiki is being constructed from plastic bottles tied together to form two hulls and covered in a plastic skin.

Rothschild, the founder of Adventure Ecology, plans to set out on April 28, the 62nd anniversary of the start of the 101-day Kon-Tiki expedition.

He and his five-man crew will sail 7,500 miles to Sydney, Australia, but the main purpose is to chart a course through the sea of plastic and draw attention to the threat it poses.

The United Nations estimates there are 46,000 pieces of plastic, most no bigger than a 1p piece, floating on every square mile of the world’s oceans and devastating marine life.

The Pacific patch is the biggest concentration, with a plastic mass estimated at 3½ tons.

Because most plastic is not biodegradable, almost every piece ever made is still somewhere on Earth. Researchers estimate that, out of about 100m tons of plastic produced each year, 10% ends up in the oceans.

Correction, 23 January 2009: In this article, we have incorrectly reported some technical details. Adventure Ecology states that it is on a mission to beat waste by thinking smart and showcasing how waste can be used as a resource through its use of the everyday, highly consumed and iconic ‘pin up’, the plastic bottle. It is building a 60ft catamaran (not a raft) out of plastic bottles, self-reinforcing PET plastic (Polyethylene terephthalate) and recycled waste products. The construction is very complex: bottles are not simply tied together and covered with a plastic skin. The engineering process will be further detailed with interviews with the team at a later date. The journey of the Plastiki across the Pacific will be approximately 10,500 nautical miles not 7,500 miles as reported in the article.

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