AWAY

Planet Home Summit, Palace of Fine Arts, CA 2019

Plastic, cardboard, reclaimed wood

Collaboration with Joel Dean Stockdill

Description

AWAY—-

The mythical place where all your stuff goes when you are done with it. 

Do you remember the last 5 things you threw away?

Probably not…

It has become such an unconscious behavior that most can’t.

Did you know that the average American produces about 4.9lbs of trash per day ?

Did you know that recycling doesn’t really work the way we hoped it did? 

Did you know that only 9% of plastic ever created has been recycled? 

Do you know the steps you can take to reduce your waste stream?

Did you know there are ways you can recycle your own plastic?

Our exhibit at Planet Home was an attempt to bring these concepts and questions to life in an interactive exhibit. 

As you enter the world of AWAY you are surrounded by towering walls filled with plastic waste. In the walls you find information about the global waste stream. 

Then you get to make a choice. 

You can choose A WAY to proceed in this world.

One way leads you through more waste to a three dimensional mural that illuminates the environmental and social impacts of “waste” and what actually happens when things go “AWAY”.

Here you also encounter characters that help debunk the recycling myth and help people understand what actually happens when you put something in the recyling bin. 

The other choice offers A WAY to transform our perspective on the way we produce, consume and dispose of the resources in our lives. 

Here the audience encounters scenes and characters that help explain why we must urgently rethink the way we make waste. 

The first step to solving this problem is reducing & rethinking how we use our materials and ultimately stop making as much trash. 

However even if we stopped producing all plastic trash today we still have 8.3 billion tonnes of it to deal with so we must figure out how to clean up our mess.

Next the audience is introduced to DIY Recycling

There is a global movement happening. People are taking matters into their own hands and making a myriad of durable products, building materials and art using plastic waste. An open source project called precious plastics has been educating people online to create the machines to safely do so.

We used these methods to transform over 4000lbs of #2 plastic into a lifesize blue whale sculpture to help highlight this concept. Our exhibit gives a step by step demonstration of this process and shows many examples of the resulting materials.

Towards the end of the space, we invited our participants to create with us in the making of a  large sculptural landscape made from our single use plastics.

Finally, with our partners at Upstream Solutions we urged folks to write their local leaders about legislation to limit single use plastics and to sign a pledge that they would live without single use plastics for 21 days.

The exhibit was later brought to the Bioneers Festival in a slightly reduced and revised iteration.