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Pre-Intermediate Student's Book: A Boat Made of Bottles

David De Rothschild built a boat called the Plastiki out of 12,500 plastic bottles to raise awareness about plastic pollution in oceans. The 18 meter boat uses renewable energy sources and has a small garden. De Rothschild sailed the Plastiki across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney, a 15,372 nautical kilometer journey, to highlight the issue of plastic waste in the oceans. The journey through giant waves and storms took 129 days, and though challenging, the boat survived well enough for future voyages.

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Daisy Jedh
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1K views2 pages

Pre-Intermediate Student's Book: A Boat Made of Bottles

David De Rothschild built a boat called the Plastiki out of 12,500 plastic bottles to raise awareness about plastic pollution in oceans. The 18 meter boat uses renewable energy sources and has a small garden. De Rothschild sailed the Plastiki across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney, a 15,372 nautical kilometer journey, to highlight the issue of plastic waste in the oceans. The journey through giant waves and storms took 129 days, and though challenging, the boat survived well enough for future voyages.

Uploaded by

Daisy Jedh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Pre-Intermediate Student’s Book

Life
5c Page 63 READING TEXT

A boat made of bottles


A boat with a difference

The Plastiki looks similar to many other boats or yachts in Sydney harbour. It’s
eighteen metres long, six metres wide and it weighs about twelve thousand
kilogrammes. It carries a crew of six people and has an average speed of five knots.
However, once you get near to the Plastiki you realise there’s a big difference. It’s
made of twelve thousand five hundred reclaimed plastic bottles.

How did the Plastiki begin?

One day, the environmentalist David De Rothschild was reading some information
about all the plastic in the seas and oceans. He couldn’t believe what he was
reading. For example, humans throw away four out of every five plastic bottles they
use and plastic rubbish causes about eighty per cent of the pollution in the sea. Soon
afterwards, Rothschild decided he wanted to help the fight against pollution in the
sea. To create publicity for the problem, he started building a boat made of plastic
bottles.

Designing the Plastiki

As well as building the boat with recycled plastic, it was important for him to make
the boat environmentally-friendly and user-friendly. The boat uses renewable
energy sources including wind power and solar energy. The crew can make meals
with vegetables from the small garden at the back of the boat. They can take a
break from work and get some exercise by using the special exercise bicycle. The
energy from the bike provides power for the boat’s computers. And if anyone needs
to take a shower, the boat’s shower uses saltwater from the sea.

The journey
Life De Rothschild sailed the Plastiki across the Pacific Ocean from
San Francisco to Sydney. That’s fifteen thousand three hundred
and seventy two nautical kilometres. On the way, De Rothschild
took the special boat through the ‘Great Garbage Patch’. It is a
huge area in the Pacific with 3.5 billion kilogrammes of rubbish. You can see every
kind of human rubbish here: shoes, toys, bags, toothbrushes, but the worst problem
is the plastic. It kills birds and sea life.

How well did the Plastiki survive the journey?

The journey wasn’t always easy and De Rothschild and his crew had to take care
during storms. There were giant ocean waves and winds of over one hundred
kilometres per hour. The whole journey took one hundred and twenty nine days.

knot (n) /nɒt/ measurement of speed at sea (1 knot = 1.8 km/hr)


garbage (n) /ˈga:bɪdʒ/ (US Eng) rubbish (UK Eng)
patch (n) /paetʃ/ area

Originally, De Rothschild thought the boat could only travel once but it survived so
well that he is planning to sail it again one day.

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