Plastic-bottle Boat Completes Voyage Across Pacific

Geez, what a waste. With 12,000 2-liter plastic bottles they could have had one rip-snorter of a bonfire. Maybe they'll do that now, to celebrate the successful voyage.

Thus once and for all proving the long-ridiculed theory that in some pre-historical time a band of hippie polymer chemists from the region now known as Sausalito CA set off in a primitive bottle raft and populated Australia - their descendants becoming the Aboriginal people of today.

Using two liter bottles is a good exercise in repurposing.

They could be stuffed into booms in corraling oil spills instead of using polymer foams for flotation.

Sure, but at what cost? Sometimes the handling and transportation costs of "re-purposed" material is considerably more than virgin material. The market is usually a good way to determine what is really "green" versus the feel good "green washing" that frequently occurs these days.

In fact in the case of glass, for many areas of the country, it consumes more fuel to transport waste glass back to the processor than the energy required to create new glass. In my parents' town in New Hampshire, they crush the glass and add it to concrete when they pour culverts as a way to "dispose" of it. It's still cheaper than paying the tipping fees at the waste transfer station so it reduces landfill expenses.

At upwards of $4-5 per pound of resin coming out of a processor's shop one could do a lot with the bottles.

Just imagine the PR to be had of a bunch of school kids cleaning out bottles they saved up at home and stuffing them into booms. The local folks doing their part to save the beaches from nasty oil. You can't buy this kind of pub. All together now, "Kumbaya, my Lord"