Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices. My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices.
My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
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Introducing Waste
Cigarette Butts
“
Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution
find their way into our oceans… One million plastic
bottles are bought every minute… The average time that
a plastic bag is used is just 12 minutes… There could be
more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050…
” 1 We have
all come in contact with alarming facts regarding plastic
waste, as its pollution has become one of the most
pressing environmental issues we are facing today. Being
just over a century old, the production of this synthetic
material has accelerated to such an extent that it has
transformed our society into a throw-away-culture and
modern life would be unrecognisable without it.
The most abundant form of plastic pollution, however,
is one that we tend to overlook. Wonderfully embodying
the notion of throwing away, cigarette butts have become
an often invisible form of waste, that are not only
part of a visual representation of life in the city, but are
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