How to reuse product packaging in order to escape the environmental catastrophe that the production of the packaging is causing.
Plastic Bottle Lifecycle
via plasticispoison <—-Check the tumblr out for more info on the lifecycle of plastic
Photographer Mandy Barker collects plastic cast off by the oceans’ massive garbage vortexes and makes beautiful (and, when you think about it, horrifying) art.
Toxic Youth: “When my husband and I set out to find a nursery school for our daughter, Faith, nearly 10 years ago, we took the decision seriously. I looked at large parent-run cooperatives and small home-based operations. Jeff visited the Montessori school on the hill and the Waldorf school in the valley. In the end, we chose a nursery school close to home with a frog pond out front, a play structure out back, and trees full of chickadees and nuthatches. We had weighed many considerations, and we all, Faith included, were happy.
“That is, until I discovered that the school’s beloved play structure—with its wooden gangway, turrets, and tunnels—was made out of pressure-treated lumber, which, at the time, contained arsenic, a carcinogen. A bladder carcinogen, in fact. I am a bladder cancer survivor and am familiar with all the ongoing medical surveillance this disease requires. So, after a lot of research and discussion, we moved our daughter to a different nursery school. The risk of doing nothing just seemed too high.
“Seven years later, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its final risk assessment for wood impregnated with chromated copper arsenate. The conclusion: Children who play frequently on pressure-treated play sets and decks experience elevated cancer risks. And yet, because the EPA stopped short of recalling preexisting structures when it outlawed arsenic-treated lumber for residential use in 2004, the play set at our old nursery school still stands.”
Artist Mary Ellen Croteau assembles Chuck Close-esque from discarded bottle caps.
Toxic or not?
- Dr. Ana Soto won’t use plastic in the microwave. R. Thomas Zoeller uses an iPhone application that flags products with potentially dangerous chemicals to help him make wise choices at the grocery store.
More on the state of the world’s plastics here, the state of the world’s plastic crap here.
We have a complicated relationship with plastic, despite its omnipresence in our consumer culture. Associated with the cheap and mass-produced, plastic is synonymous with disposability. The very qualities that have made it so perfect for mass production—its protean nature and ability to be reliably molded with heat and pressure into an astonishing variety of shapes and sizes—contribute to our perception of the material as utterly synthetic and machine-made.
The word plastic is also used to describe someone who is inauthentic. If all of that, coupled with the enormous heaps of trash piling up on our planet, weren’t unsettling enough, we also have cause to be concerned about the health effects of plastics.
