Bottle Buoy The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), a charity registered in England, Wales and Scotland, has been testing and developing a new lifesaving device in hopes of reducing the 372,000 people who drown annually, 90 percent of whom live in low-income countries. The idea was originally created by James Benson, a student who was studying product design at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Benson set himself a personal goal of developing a rescue device and entered the design in a competition held by the International Rescue Federation. The RNLI heard about it and asked Benson if it could be used in low-income countries, since the standard two-litre bottle is common throughout the world, and is— unfortunately—helping to fill the seas with plastic trash. But the bottle-rescue device could actually be helpful in alleviating the trash problem. After hearing of the design, a carpenter in Bangladesh
News & Views for Southern Sailors
created a wood prototype, but producing plastic versions through injection moulding could be done at very low cost in high volume. The RNLI has been testing the device and plans to develop it and make it commercially open source for production. www.bottlebuoy.com
SOUTHWINDS
June 2017
35