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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Personal Waste
Since the start of my studies, the amount of waste produced
in a university context has always been a large
debate. What to do with all the leftover material – the test
prints, the prototypes, the material experiments, the contaminated
moulds, the plastic boxes – or even the final
outcome after it has been exhibited? Initiatives such as
the re:lab at Kunsthochschule Weißensee make a great
effort to undermine these waste streams and make leftover
materials from one project available for the next.
For this project, I have reused an estimate of 1000 cigarette
butts in various forms, which make up about 200
grams. As for other materials, the waste I produced adds
up to the following numbers:
22
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