Green Options

The last time you visited an aquarium, you probably saw one. With their zebra-like stripes, multiple spines, and elaborate fins, they’re quite beautiful and incredibly distinctive. But red lionfish are also voracious carnivores that breed like rabbits and are poisonous to boot. And they’re invading the coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

World class adventurer, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and a descendant of the legendary Rothschild banking family, David de Rothschild, will attempt to do what no one has done before, sail half-way around the world from California to Australia on a catamaran made 90% of recycled plastic waste powered only by the wind and the sun.

However this is not the first journey to be made across the Pacific using plastic waste. Last year a raft made of 15,000 bottles called the Junk successfully made a similar journey from California to Hawaii in 87 days in order to promote awareness of the global plastic waste problem.

The Brazilian government has today signed a federal decree establishing the Brazilian Whale and Dolphin Sanctuary, which will drastically increase protection for all cetacean species along the country’s entire 5,000 mile long coast.

According to José Truda Palazzo, Jr., Brazilian Commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, “the initiative sends a clear and powerful message to the international community in relation to Brazil’s commitment towards whale conservation, and also reinforces our campaign for a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary to be established in the entire oceanic basin.”

Where does much of the world’s plastic trash end up? It ends up in a floating, Pacific gyre of “garbage soup” that’s now twice as large as the continental U.S. If the image of the jellyfish [...]