The foundation sailing the sun-powered catamaran, in the fifth year of its global campaign, anchored in Jakarta on Wednesday, having traveled from Bali. The vessel will remain in the country until July 30.

During its two-month stopover in Bali and Jakarta, the Switzerland-based foundation will collaborate with local NGOs and communities to propose local solutions to the global problem.

A crew member of the boat, Annabelle Boudinot, shared her experience during the journey. “If we talk about navigation, it has been pretty well. [the boat] is solar-powered, therefore, it depends on how sufficient the sunlight is,” she told The Jakarta Post in an interview on Friday.

Boudinot said they had to stay in the tropical area to get enough energy to keep the boat sailing because if they went too far from the equator, the energy was harder to get.

Claimed to be the first and the biggest catamaran to not use diesel as a means of propulsion, the 100-percent no-emissions Race for Water vessel is equipped with 783 solar panels with a total width of 512 square meters, planted on the upper deck.

It also collects energy from a 40-sqm towing kite deployed at an altitude of 150 meters, and 200 kilograms of hydrogen at 350 bars stored in 25 bottles that is created from pumping the saltwater. Since the boat has no diesel as propulsion, it can only sail at a maximum speed of 4 to 8 knots.

Race for Water expeditions began amid concerns that oceans, as a major source of life, had been contaminated by plastics. In 2015, the foundation decided to launch a scientific and environmental expedition, called the Odyssey, to make a global assessment of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

They found that “plastic islands” — large land masses made of tons of built up marine debris — did not exist, but that there were soups of microplastics drifting along the ocean gyres, large systems of circulating ocean currents, particularly those involved with large wind movements.

The first Odyssey voyage covered a distance of around 51,000 kilometers and made 17 stopovers across the world.

“[To think] that we can clean the ocean is wrong. We must fight on the land. We have to fight before the plastics reach the ocean,” Race for Water founder Marco Simeoni told the media on Friday.

The second expedition departed from Lorient, France, in 2017 and has visited 17 places in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean, passing through the Panama canal into the Pacific Ocean before arriving in Indonesia. The expedition will end in 2021 with a target of making 38 stopovers worldwide including Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, India and the Mediterranean Sea before returning to France.

The second Odyssey expedition is focusing on raising people’s awareness about the importance of preventing plastic waste from reaching the oceans. One way is to turn the waste into other energies.

As one of the biggest archipelagic countries in the world, Indonesia has been named the country with the second most polluted ocean in the world after China. An estimated 1.3 million tons of plastic waste is produced daily across the archipelago, creating a major threat to the ocean ecosystem.

Indonesia, along with China and three other ASEAN members Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, are the five countries that throw the most plastic waste into oceans, according to a 2017 report issued by Ocean Conservancy, a United States-based environmental advocacy group.

Coordinating Maritime Affairs Ministry official Safri Burhanuddin said the government was committed to reducing marine plastic debris, not on the sea but before it reaches the sea, by 70 percent by 2025.

“The most important thing is how to change people’s behavior, to make sure they do not throw away plastic into waterways,” he said. (asp)

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