David de Rothschild, part of the Rothschild banking dynasty, is due to sail across the Pacific on a catamaran made of recycled plastic.

Rothschild, 31, founder of the organization Adventure Ecology, plans to reach the Eastern Garbage Patch, an area in the southern Pacific two times the size of Texas where much of our waste plastic is washed up as two currents converge. ‘5.8 million pieces of marine debris go into the sea every single day’, he warns.

Rothschild, who has previously traversed the Antarctic and part of the Arctic, has as his mission ‘to beat waste by inspiring sustainable solutions and to highlight the ecological damage being done to the world’s oceans’.

The 60ft catamaran Plastiki, made of self-reinforced polyethylene terephthalate (srPET), a fully recyclable plastic, will be kept afloat by 12,500 waste plastic bottles attached to its sides. Jo Royle, 30, will skipper the boat, but the rest of the six person crew is yet to be decided, apart from a filmmaker from National Geographic. The voyage’s approximate departure is scheduled for mid November from San Francisco.