While looking on the website Vice and watching their documentaries an advert popped up for a documentary called 'The Plastic Age' so I read the article and then watched it.
The Plastic Age is a documentary about how much plastic we create and then how much ends up floating in the sea to be washed up on shores all over the world. They suggest that like we have names such as the Stone Age or Iron Age for different era's, we are now living in the plastic age.
We make roughly 288 million tonnes of plastic a year, and unlike paper, metal, glass or wood it doesn't biodegrade, instead it ends up in our oceans, making the ratio of plastic the plankton 100:1.
There is even an area in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch thought to be the size of Texas and made up almost entirely of discarded plastic. Over the last 50 years, an estimated 300 million tonnes of plastic has ended up in the sea, and has worked its way up the food chain, ultimately into the blood of humankind. Due to fish eating the stuff and so forth until we eat the fish.
The documentary takes you through all of these facts and then shows you what Bionic Yarn is doing to counter this problem. Pharrell Williams is the creative directer at Bionic Yarn, a company that turns this waste plastic into fibres and then makes them into clothing. This shows how a group of people have taken a global problem such as plastic waste and began thinking of ways they can turn this now useless material back into something useful again.
The documentary can be found below.
This documentary really got me thinking about how much waste we create and how we don't think twice about throwing it into the rubbish and thus never consider it again. This made me start to think about basing my project on waste in general, because firstly it fits really well with our theme of 'culture and society' due to it being about our throwaway mentality as a society. And secondly, it fits really well with our exhibition title because I would be directly focusing my project on 'products of our environment'. Furthermore, we currently have a growing problem with how much waste we create which would mean if I based my project on this, it would be very current and thus interesting for a viewer to look at.
After watching this documentary and beginning to think into this idea of a project on 'waste', I've decided to follow it up.