“Death to the Living, Long Live Trash” is an Exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum all about art that was created from reused plastic waste that was found on the beach. The artist, Duke creates beautiful mosaic-type pieces that are made of 100% found plastic and is is pictured above. His genius uses of different materials blows me away and my favorite piece of his is the different fishing lures that he made from different common plastic trash Like the lure made from the Juicy Drop Pop. He also makes scrimshaws by using plastic bottles instead of whale bones. They where so convincing that it was almost impossible to tell what is real and what he made.

All of his work has made me reflect on the amount of plastic that I use and it makes me take a step back and think about how I could use it instead of recycling it or throwing it away. It inspired me to think outside of the box when it comes to art or any other activity and try to use unconventional materials to make something that is inspiring and beautiful.

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Karen Napolitano, who is the education and outreach coordinator of SIMS Recycling Center met us at the front entrance and showed us around. We saw a presentation where I learned that the statistic, “only 9% of plastic that is produced is actually recycled” is misleading because it accounts for plastics that are usually reused like toilet seats and printers. We also learned that the reason that they don’t recycle certain plastics is because the companies that buy the materials don’t want them. The companies only want hard plastic so all of the soft plastic that get recycled just go to landfill.

When we first got into the building, we went through a sort of museum that had all of the different processes that are used in recycling on a smaller scale so that you could see and understand them close up. Probably the most fun one was the manual sorting station where someone would turn a conveyor belt and you would have to sort different items into different categories, metal, paper, and plastic. It put into perspective how hard it is to work a job like recycling and it made me appreciate the people who do it even more.

Then came when we actually got to see the real machines and they were really cool. There was so many different conveyor belts and it was cool to see all of the different processes that we explored on a miniature scale in real life. There was a front loader that was moving a ton of trash around and it was really cool to just watch it. On the way out we saw all of the different bales of plastic stacked on top of another and there was so much plastic just in that pile that it put into perspective how much plastic we use every day just in NYC.

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Last Friday my group and I had an interview with Erica Cirino who is the communications manager at Plastic Pollution Coefficient. During the interview I learned a lot of very interesting information and she also spoke a lot about how we can work together to help fix the plastic problem. I learned a lot about microplastics and nano plastics and how they end up inside of us even if we are just breathing. We also learned that fish eat a lot of plastic and they are at the bottom of the food chain. Wales also eat a lot of plastic because they are filter feeders they just take in huge gulps of sea water and in that seawater are microplastics. Erica also told us about an organization that the PPC works with that helps reduce the amount of single use plastic in schools. The most shocking thing that I learned was the fact that of all recycled plastic, only 5% actually gets recycled. So instead of buying single use plastic items and then recycling them, you should just avoid them in the first place.

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Graydon and I watched Graduate students pitch their business plans in a business competition all about the environment and sustainability. I saw 5 30 minute presentations and while none of them were about microplastics specifically, I learned a lot and watching people present something they are very passionate about was really cool. My favorite company was all about collecting excess rain to water people’s lawns. Their idea was people would order their produce and they would come and install it for you. whenever it rained their system would collect the water and direct it into your water line going to the sprinklers in your garden and lawn. I learned that maintaining the ideal “american” lawn costs upwards of $10,000 every single year. In places like New Jersey people are only allowed to use a certain amount of water because they often have shortages. Because of this people cannot water their lawn occasionally and you can probably see why this is problematic, the grass would die and it would cost a huge amount of money to fix. Their system is made with off the shelf components from places like The Home Depot so they can easily make them and customize them to their customer’s needs. There was another group whose idea was to take excess coffee grinds from cafes and other places and get paid to do so. They would then use those coffee grinds and put them in soap instead of little pieces of plastic (microplastics) so you could get the same scrubbing effect without the plastic.

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