Every year, at least 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean. That plastic gets digested by sea animals, gets stuck or tangled around their bodies, or it just sits there in the water emitting toxic chemicals. A lot of trash travels in the ocean and settles into “gyres”, or, ocean garbage patches, trapped by currents. Thus, large amounts of plastic, chemical sludge and other debris end up in the same places, making essentially islands of garbage. Soon the whole world could look like this. 

For our final project in Space and Materiality, my group and I decided to make a globe out of plastic. We used recycled plastic bags from our own consumption to form the world’s continents. Our idea was to show the excess of plastic that we produce and throw away, and that we can actually use some of our trash to make things. We wanted to give our trash a second life.

However, for aesthetic’s sake, we decided to use Party City blue tablecloth plastic to resemble the oceans. I felt really conflicted about this, because it’s just encouraging more plastic being bought and thrown away, but under the time allotted it seemed like the only option for an aesthetically pleasing end product, which we all wanted.

The presentation of our project led to a lively debate amongst the group. Should we blow up our globe in a park, or a waterway to hint at the garbage islands? That seemed like it would just be adding to the problem. So we decided to blow it up from inside of a trash can, with other pieces of trash around it, as a dark commentary on the future of our world.

After we came up with the concept, I drew outlines of the continents on Adobe Illustrator and scaled them up mathematically. We then printed them out, tracing the shapes onto the plastic fabric. I also spent a lot of time ironing the plastic bags we collected into fabric, as well as collecting bags, cutting out continents, buying and bringing other tools we needed, discussing the presentation, and doing research on our issue.

  I really enjoyed this project because the craft is so hands-on and intuitive, and it allowed me to seriously consider how harmful plastic really is to the ocean, to the air, to animals, and to ourselves. How can we decrease the amount of plastic we acquire and dispose of? How do we dispose of it properly? I learned that most of the plastic we throw in the recycling bin doesn’t even get recycled, including plastic bags. Now that I know that we can use our trash ourselves, I will be thinking a lot more critically before I purchase and before I throw away; Maybe there is a lot more art to be made from recycled garbage.