Artist "Parts the Plastic Sea" in #Strawpocalypse Installation
- Bank App in New Zealand Will Let You Open an Account (With a Selfie)
- Who Needs an Assistant When You Can Mount Flashes to Your Head?
All Photos via Von Wong, used with permission
"It's just one straw, said 8 billion people."
This is how the #Strawpocalypse installation begins, as a warning against excessive plastic use.
In order to bring awareness to the many intricacies behind our flooding of the oceans with plastic, Von Wong created this installation out of 168,000 used straws. It took a group of hundreds of volunteers over 6 months to collect all of them.
Von Wong could easily have purchased the straws. You can buy 100,000 of them for $10, which is where this whole problem probably originated from.
But, that would be entirely hypocritical, so he joined together with Zero Waste Saigon and Starbucks Vietnam to gather them all.
"If things don't change by the year 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea," the campaign points out.
Wong then created an art installation representing the "parting of the plastic sea," which is over 10 feet tall and currently lives at Estella Place in Ho Chi Minh City until March 24th.
"It took us almost two weeks of work to clean, organize and prepare our straws," the campaign reads.
The finished product features white straws as the froth on the waves, green/blue/black straws for the base of the waves, and orange/yellow straws as the sand on the bottom of the "ocean."
Since they already had the needed volunteers, they wanted to make the installation more poignant by using plastic bags to support the straw structure.
Editor's Tip: Do you have beautiful photos but aren't sure how to display them? Turn them into large format prints! See what your photos look like as fine art.
The plastic bags were also used as a diffuser for the LED lighting on the installation.
If you aren't in the mood to visit Ho Chi Minh in the next few months, you can also watch this video about what went into the creation of the installation.
Learn More:
Via Von Wong