Plastiki setting sail for Sydney

3:28 AM Sat 6 Feb 2010 GMT

'Plastiki sailing on SFO Bay' .

San Francisco based Adventure Ecology took their message of recycling and impact on the seas to the next level with the Plastiki, a boat made from recycled PET bottles which has completed its sea trials and is due to undertake its mission from San Fran to Sydney within weeks.

The group, spearheaded by banking heir, David de Rothschild, used 12,000 bottles filled with carbon dioxide to construct the durable ship, and everything from the sail to the mast is made from plastic materials as well. The crew plans to set sail for a three-month voyage from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia.

De Rothschild hopes the ship's expedition will bring attention to the global waste problem.

'We're needlessly losing millions of seabirds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals from ingesting plastic every year,' he said. 'I decided to take this 'out of sight, out of mind' problem and build a boat out of the very items that we were seeing ending up in our natural environment.'

One of the main sights they'll be highlighting along their voyage will be Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the cluster of detritus estimated to be twice the size of Texas.