Odd lot: The boat that sailed from recycled bottles

One item of plastic many of us use in our daily lives is the water bottle. Each bottle requires three times the water it can hold to produce.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles were patented by engineer Nathaniel Wyeth in 1973. These were the first plastic bottles to be able to withstand the pressure of carbonated liquids and were a much cheaper alternative to glass bottles.

Globally, more than a million plastic bottles are sold every single minute. In the US, only 30% of these bottles are recycled. In India, 65% of used PET bottles are recycled at registered facilities, 15% in the unorganized sector with 10% reused at homes. But none of these probably compare to Plastiki, a 60ft catamaran made out of 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles and other recycled PET plastic and waste products which went on a 12,000-nautical-mile sea mission.