SAN FRANCISCO (California) - DAVID de Rothschild hopes to build a boat from thousands of empty plastic bottles and sail from California to Australia to highlight global waste.

The 60-foot catamaran will be made entirely of recycled plastic except for the metal masts said Mr De Rothschild.

"It's all sail power," he said. "The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into our oceans for that matter, so everything on the boat will be composted. Everything will be recycled. Even the vessel is going to end up being recycled when we finish," he told CNN on Monday.

Scheduled to sail from San Francisco in April, the vessel has been named Plastiki in honour of Thor Heyerdahl, the fabled Norwegian explorer who in 1947 sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific on the Kon-Tiki, a raft made from balsa wood.

Part of the wealthy British banking family, Mr de Rothschild is something of an adventurer. In 2005 he founded Adventure Ecology, an organization that uses field expeditions to call attention to environmental issues.

The Plastiki is expected to stop in Hawaii, Tuvalu and Fiji on its way to Sydney, a trip estimated to take more than 100 days.

Only about 10 percent of the Plastiki will be made from new materials, Mr de Rothschild said. He declined to reveal how much it's costing him to build the boat.