EcoArt in VT: Plastic bottles and awareness
Americans have increased their plastic bottle consumption over the years. According to the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), beverage sales have increased over five-fold in the last 30 years. On average, American consumers purchase over 500 million beverage bottles and cans every day. This amount of purchased bottles means that Americans spend more money on bottled water than on iPods or movie tickets, totaling about $15 billion a year. More specifically, Americans use 60 million PET plastic bottles everyday, which is about 2.5 million plastic bottles an hour. However, a growing concern is the disposal of those millions of plastic bottles. Two out of every three bottles sold end up in landfills, are incinerated or littered. Therefore, only one out of three plastic bottles is actually recycled. Once a plastic bottle reaches a landfill, it takes 450 years to decompose. That means that if Queen Elizabeth I threw away a plastic bottle, it would still be here today. The CRI claims that the United States’ container recycling rates have declined from 53.5% in 1992 to 33.5% in 2004. Many Americans are unaware of the impacts that the plastic bottles they throw away have on the environment.
Carnegie Mellon’s Ecoart project emphasized an environmental issue through the use trash as public art. The Carnegie Mellon students constructed a wall out of campus waste to help show the students how much trash their community was creating. After seeing Carnegie Mellon’s Ecoart project, an Earth Sustainability class group was inspired to build a similar installation to emphasize plastic bottle consumption. For the project, they wanted to raise campus awareness about consumption of plastic bottles through a public art display.
The results: a five-panel display built by plastic bottles. They used 1,328 soda and water bottles to build a color spectrum wall. They collected 537 trashed bottles (not recycled), which made up 40% of our structure. By doing some calculations, they found that for a whole academic year, here at Virginia Tech, the campus population would throw away approximately 17,184 bottles in front of just one building, Dietrich. In addition, if we lived on the Virginia Tech campus all year round and throw around the same number of bottles per week, we would throw away a total of about 28,000 bottles in front of Dietrich alone.
Ecologica Art (EcoArt) is a growing contemporary movement of green art today that is created by those who are concerned about local and global environmental situations, and who take art making to a functional format. It seems as though we need more projects like these to provide a better sense of what problems we as consumers are creating.
-Eliana Sejas
This is a great idea. People respond to what they see. Reading figures that Americans are wasteful and don't recycle are overlooked and ignored. But if you can make a creative statement that is hard to go unnoticed, then people will associate the image with a message. This is cause them to rethink their actions every time they go to throw something away which could be recycled. Among other possibilities to help lessen the amount of Tech's lack of recycling is to take away the plastic bottles. If students were given reusable bottles, they could put in their drink of choice from dispensers. Many students already use reusable bottles so the transferring to the system would not be that hard.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is a great idea. Also, I think this program has the potential of having a two-fold benefit. There are programs around the country, specifically in inner-cities, that promote creativity through artwork for elementary and middle school aged children. The aim is to keep kids safe after school while exposing them to the arts. This program would be a great way for inner city children do do artwork in an eco-friendly way. It would also give kids a sense of pride if their work was put on display.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is a really great idea because our lifestyle has become so "throw and forget" that no one sees over the years how much they are throwing away. This may stir up some awareness of the sheer volume of waste we are putting in landfills and hopefully encourage recycling. Awareness needs to be spread of how living in such a linear fashion is completely unsustainable and cannot go on for much longer. I love that this education is incorporated into an art movement, particularly because art movements in the past have most often accompanied changes in thinking so maybe susintainablity and art can go hand in hand. On a side note, speaking of the amount of plastic going into landfills, this reminded me of an interesting article I read a little while ago about a boy who discovered how to isolate the microbes that decompose plastic to one day decompose landfill trash: http://www.mnn.com/technology/research-innovations/blogs/boy-discovers-microbe-that-eats-plastic
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that this is an awesome idea. Art is something that people can appreciate and using recycled goods is an excellent way to show people that their everyday waste can be reused. Art is not the only way in which people are reusing everyday waste. Uncommongoods. com carries a line of picture frames, purses, and different types of jewelry that are made from anything from old magazines, cardboard,records, to glass bottles and aluminum cans.
ReplyDeleteA very well known artist that both sculpts and paints with recycled goods is John Dalhsen, you may find his website interesting www.johndalhsen.com as it shows a lot of his recent artwork that ties in very well with your topic.
We definitely live in a society that is all about "throw and forget". For the most part, it is a lot easier for people to throw away their trash in trash cans rather than thinking of the type of trash they have, and where it can be properly recycled. A lot of people don't see the impact that there actions are having on the environment, or how much their individual behavior is contributing to it. Illustrating it through Eco Art, like the displays made of trash and plastic bottles, it allows people to see it. It is something tangible to connect their behavior to. To my surprise, there are a lot of courses being taught on eco art, that provides opportunity to get involved in a local public project. Such courses also provide insight into how to incroporate eco art practices into every day life. It also provides a forum for discussion of ecological issues on both local and global levels and collaboration on specific site projects. I found an example of such a course here:http://www.earthdance.net/programs/seedsEcoArts09.htm
ReplyDeleteNot only does this add a new creative outlet, but is also educational!