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Vision Create Interiors Create Fashion & Beauty Colour Retail Spaces Events Travel Culture News & Analysis 25 July 2011 Tessa Mansfield / Logout / My Stylus Vision Create Interiors Create Fashion & Beauty Colour Retail Spaces Events Travel Culture News & Analysis VISION > THE DESIGN LEGACY OF THE PLASTIKI SEARCH STYLUS TOOLS MATERIAL FOCUS Jan 20 2011 DESIGN LEGACY OF THE PLASTIKI GALLERY / 23 IMAGES The Design Legacy of the Plastiki The success of the Plastiki's 10,000-mile, 128-day voyage from San Francisco to Sydney last year is considered by many to be one of the great adventures of 2010. Sailing a boat made from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles (to raise awareness of our polluted oceans) was a feat of such determination that expedition leader, David de Rothschild, has been nominated for Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. At many points along Plastiki’s journey, long before the plastic bottles that set the benchmark for this project. boat ever made it into the water, there were times when this project looked like it would never happen. Technical, There was no doubt that it would be difficult to build a ARTICLE REFERENCES The Design Legacy of the Plastiki material and sustainability challenges set back the boat’s bottle boat with sufficient structural integrity to weather the departure over several years. ocean, but no one foresaw that it would take four years of Plastiki.com Adventureecology.com research, experimentation and material innovation to It was the combined inspiration of Thor Heyerdahl’s epic produce the final sea-worthy vessel. 1947 Kon-Tiki raft voyage across the Pacific and David de Rothschild’s vision of a boat made from reclaimed Vision Thread Sustainable Summer School 11:00 / 25 JUL 2011 A seven day-long ‘working vacation’ organised by Europe-based sustainable design institute REcentre aims to advise its participants in... » Hello Etsy 11:00 / 22 JUL 2011 Etsy – the online marketplace for handmade goods – is holding its first conference in Berlin, Germany towards the end of September. Hello Etsy: A... » The Great Pacific Garbage Patch De Rothschild was motivated by a 2006 United Nations Environment Programme report called Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Deep Waters and High Seas, combined with the discovery of several areas in the Pacific Gyre, each estimated to be the size of Texas, that are swirling vortices of millions of tonnes of plastic waste. These people-caused Great Pacific Garbage Patches are polluting the ocean, killing marine life and feeding toxins back into the food chain. It prompted the Plastiki mission, which was aimed at changing people’s attitudes towards the disposable of plastics. In 2007 the biomimicry architect Michael Pawlyn was invited by de Rothschild to create a design concept for the Plastiki. Pawlyn says de Rothschild’s knowledge and enthusiasm for cradle-to-cradle design thinking encouraged him 24-Hour Climate Reality to seek out an innovative approach to boat design that was not immediately available in the conservative discipline of 11:00 / 21 JUL 2011 naval architecture. It's been four years since the release of Al Gore’s environmental film documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and now he is back with Pawlyn, and his team at Exploration Architecture, needed to find a way of holding thousands of plastic bottles together a new campaign –... » and keeping them afloat. They started looking at forms that bind weak elements together to make them stronger. The traditional way that the Japanese package eggs together using raffia to create a strong net-like structure is one VIEW ALL example. But Pawlyn’s big inspiration, in true biomimicry style, was the natural form of the pomegranate. He says: “The way a pomegranate is made up out of a whole series of small segments that interlock, all the gaps are filled and are then wrapped in a tough skin to produce a very solid fruit. So we started exploring ways of bundling bottles together and getting them to interlock.” But how to get these interlocking bottles to float? Pawlyn explains: “One of the key things about a pomegranate is that each little segment has internal pressure that pushes against its membrane to give it strength. We realised that we could do the same thing by pressurising the bottles. So just by adding air we added great strength to the individual building blocks.” Inventing New Materials In addition to the use of reclaimed bottles, the Plastiki project manager and skipper Jo Royle remembers the long search for a suitable ocean going material for the boat. Unlike traditional boat building materials, such as glass and carbon fibre, it had to be easily recyclable and reusable. Eventually the team found a woven PET fabric – strand reinforced PET – which crucially had the same properties as the plastic bottles being used to float the boat. The srPET is a self-reinforcing thermo plastic, which Royle explains: “Means the fibre has two weaves, one changing form at a lower temperature than the other. When heated, therefore, one fibre forms the structural integrity while the other forms the bond. Sections could be heat welded together, eliminating the need for toxic resins.” A Multifunctional Off-Grid Shelter In keeping with his mission for sustainable innovation, de Rothschild invited Nathanial Corum, of the non-profit group Architecture for Humanity, to design the Plastiki cabin. This shelter needed to sit lightly on top of the catamaran style hull. Corum describes it as: “The ultimate off-the-grid house project.” While the cabin’s appearance is clearly inspired by US engineer Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic structures, Corum took up the biomimicry baton from Pawlyn, also finding inspiration in the shapes of turtle shells and horseshoe crab shells. These are: “Ancient and strong forms that,” he says, “have lasted eons in the oceans.” The cabin needed to be a robust multifunctional space. Corum describes it as: “Compactly providing for the living, cooking, sleeping and shelter/protection needs of six crew members. With the additional features of a bespoke photovoltaic solar double roof to help keep the cabin cooler and a grab rail about the perimeter that doubled as a rainwater collection system.” The material that the cabin was made out of was largely of the same srPET from which much of the boat was built – and without doubt the most innovative element of this construction project. Corum marvels at the flexibility and diversity of applications for the srPET recyclable plastic that was used. “Most parts of cabin are of srPET including the shell, walls/bulkheads, furniture frames, counters, even hinges on the cabinets, and a transparent type specified for the large windows." The srPET material was right, but the srPET in its heat treated panel form, now called Seretex, had never been used to build anything before, so there were still naval engineering questions needing to be answered. Two polymer specialists, appropriately known as the Bender Brothers, Australian naval architect Andrew Dovell, and Cornish boat builder Andy Fox “became the brains behind understanding and working with Seretex”, as Royle puts it. Months of panel making experiments ensued, which involved painstakingly cooking the Seretex in 1-metre sections using a snowboard press. The hard won result was a valuable new building material for the construction industry that proved to be incredibly versatile, and most importantly sustainable. It is possible to make the material from 100% recycled content and then recycled again at end of life. GALLERY / 2 MORE IMAGES Reducing Environmental Impact at Every Turn The desire to produce Plastiki with the least environmental impact possible extended to all areas of the boat. When the Seretex cabin could not be heat-welded to the Seretex deck a cashew nut and honey glue was used, rather than traditionally toxic resins. The plastic bottles that made up the catamaran hull structure, pressurised with dry ice for rigidity, were supplied from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Recycling centre. The Plastiki sailcloth was made from a woven material with 78% post consumer content. The Powerful Plastiki Influence When the Plastiki was finished, the aesthetic was utterly fantastic, even though it was not the most efficient sailing vessel ever built. It performed more like the Kon-Tiki raft than was perhaps desirable, flexing dramatically in stormy weather. However, it safely transported a crew across the Pacific Ocean while sending an important message to the world. The impact of this design adventure cannot yet be measured, but it is certain that the material innovations it created will have great influence. Designer, TreeHugger.com founder and Plastiki crew member Graham Hill comments: “The biggest result is simply showing people that a person, in this case David de Rothschild, can have a crazy vision for something and with persistence and a great team can pull it together. “So much innovation had to happen to make this project a reality, it’s very inspiring. They came up with materials, glues and applications that all can be used for future boats and many other products.” Hill continues: “The project also brought a ton of focus on the oceans and on the role of plastics in our lives. We don’t need to vilify plastics, we just need to redesign how we use them such that they can be a boon to humanity and not the opposite, as they are now.” Sustainable Futures The last word goes to the ‘crazy visionary’ himself, David de Rothschild who is busy working on different aspects of the Plastiki legacy project, including a book and developing further commercial applications for Seretex. He says: “For me, the strongest element evolving out of the Plastiki is her ability to inspire change through storytelling. To reignite people’s curiosity, to recognise the ‘anything is possible mentality’, in the hope that we can move from our current spate of relaxatism towards a more action oriented planet 2.0 society.” theplastiki.com adventureecology.com ARTICLE REFERENCES DESIGN LEGACY OF THE PLASTIKI GALLERY / 23 IMAGES The Design Legacy of the Plastiki Plastiki.com Adventureecology.com STYLUS OVERVIEW BENEFITS TO YOUR BUSINESS MEET THE TEAM PRESS SUBSCRIBE TO STYLUS CONTACT US TERMS & CONDITIONS CAREERS © STYLUS MEDIA GROUP 2011.
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