Why is plastic waste problematic?

Plastic pollution is quickly becoming one of the most important environmental issues. Year on year we increasingly consume more plastic which gives rise to more and more plastic waste. To put this into perspective, half of all plastics ever produced were made in the past 15 years. We can attribute our increasing reliance on plastics to the rise of synthetic plastics in the latter half of the 20th century, since then they have become ubiquitous in our everyday life.

If you look around you right now you are probably surrounded by plastic objects. Plastics are extremely useful materials with many desirable properties such as their durability, ease to mold and shape, flexibility, lightweight, and relative inexpensiveness. Many of these properties are what make them highly damaging to the environment. To put this into perspective here are some common household items and an estimation of their decomposition times:

• Cigarette butt - 5 to 10 years

• Plastic bags - 20 years

• Plastic straws - 200 years

• Plastic bottles - 450 years

• Disposable diapers - 500 years

These are just a few examples of the sorts of plastic waste which end up in our environment. As you can see many of these items are single-use meaning you might use them for a matter of minutes or hours only for them to sit in the environment for 100s of years. Plastic waste ends up in almost all environments, but most notably the ocean which damages ecosystems and the environment more broadly. The biggest thing we can do to help prevent plastic waste as a consumer is to educate others to make better decisions on when and how they use plastic to reduce our consumption and therefore waste output.

Artists have always used their work to communicate powerful messages. With the increasing demand for action towards climate change, some artists have turned to use their work to remind viewers of the impact plastic waste has on our planet encouraging us to rethink our consumption and shock us into enacting change. Here we look at four artists who have created work from plastic waste.

1. Plastikophobia by Von Wong - Laura Francois and Joshua Goh

Plastikophobia is an installation work consisting of 18,000 single-use plastic cups which comments on our overconsumption of plastics. While the work itself might look like a beautifully immersive cave in the end you are left with the uneasiness about our relationship with plastics. It provides a shocking message, particularly when you discover they collect all these cups in one day showing the sheer scale of the problem. The work is meant to evoke a sense of ‘plastikophobia’ (a fear of plastics) as they move through the suffocating sea of plastic cups. The artists hope to provoke conversations around using less plastic and make visitors think twice before they opt for single-use plastic.

2. Sea Globes - Max Liboiron

Now we look at an artist tackling plastic waste on the small scale. Max Liboiron created a series of what she describes as ‘sea globes’ where he subverts the popular souvenirs of a snow globe but fills them with water from the Hudson River.

The plastic floating in the globes comes from the river while the bituminous coal from a landfill that closed in the 1930s at Deadhorse Bay. The globs provide a commentary on plastic pollution in the Hudson River. Max Liboiron was inspired by her work as an environmental scientist whose work studies how toxins from marine plastics are damaging our environment.

3. Vida Tóxica (Toxic Life) - Ally Alvaro Soler Arpa

Catalan artist Ally Alvaro Soler Arpa created the work Vida Tóxica through his otherworldly creatures created using plastic waste and animal bones. The result is slightly disturbing dystopian creatures, which he describes as contemporary dinosaurs he creates this effect by combining bones of multiple animals such as bull, cow, horse, wild boar, vulture, antelope, ostrich, and lamb with plastic waste creating something never seen before. The works comment on the human impact of plastic waste on our ecosystem and animals, we might liken the sculptures as drawing parallels with images of turtles and other sea life getting trapped in floating plastic waste. He hopes these sculptures will provoke viewers how we pollute the plant and its impact on the world

4. Everyday Plastic - Danial Web

English artist Danial Web he started with the question “how much plastic does one person produce?” This lead him to collect every single piece of plastic he used in 2017, the result was his massive mural entitled ‘Everyday plastic’. He said the whole experience really open his eye to just how much plastic one person can consume, he was shocked by the 200 of salad/vegetable bags and 150 crisp packets among other things. He says the work has made him make a conscious effort to use less plastic and hopes it will provoke others to do the same. Overall his work illustrates that the consumption and choices of one person can have a huge impact on the amount of waste we produce.