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>> SFEIR: When you look out the window
here at the Serpent Lounge
at the United Nations headquarters
in Geneva, Switzerland
we see a large circle of colorful,
glittering objects with a path weaving through.
It is a labyrinth constructed
with 8,000 pet bottles
that I mainly collected
from garbage cans at the United Nations,
the World Health Organization,
and the Botanical Gardens.
This is a conservative estimate
of the number of plastic bottles
going into landfill every second on Earth.
Approximately 320 to 400 billion
plastic drink bottles are manufactured each year.
And only around 20% are recycled.
It takes about 450 years
for a plastic bottle to degrade
and according to UNAP
every square mile of the ocean
has 46,000 pieces of floating plastic on it.
For thousands of years
humans have built labyrinths
in all parts of the world
as symbolic forms of pilgrimage,
walking the path to the center
to reach salvation or enlightenment.
Today we find ourselves facing
a threat to human kind
of unprecedented magnitude.
We are drowning in trash
and using vast quantities of raw materials
while generating life threatening pollutants
in the process.
Although traditionally a labyrinth
is a singular path that leads to the center,
I designed this labyrinth to resemble
both an outline of a hand
as well as that of a tree.
Both these organic forms
are part of the interdependent system.
This is a labyrinth,
but not a traditional labyrinth
so what happens is usually
in a labyrinth you walk around
in a circle until you get to the center
where you are supposed to reach enlightenment
but what I wanted this to be is
a handprint and so that you
walk your own hand
as well as an organic tree
and the reason that I picked a hand
is because it is supposed to represent
the way humans are imprinting ourselves
on the world without really
realizing what we are doing.
and by walking this path
and seeing the sea of bottles
that is being created in one second
then hopefully people will gain awareness
by the time they come out of this path.
I started the piece with a simple idea,
to make people aware of plastic bottle waste
and to encourage people to reduce,
reuse and recycle.
However, I soon realized that these strategies
would only slow down the inevitable.
Plastic bottles have not been designed
with the idea of recycling
so additional chemicals have to be added
during the recycling process
and the recycled plastic
perhaps gets one more use out of it
such as a bench or a t-shirt
before it ends up in landfill.
To reduce, reuse and recycle
are very important steps
in dealing with our waste
and this strategy has long been the focus
for many environmentalists.
However, it is time for us to eliminate
the concept of waste altogether.
We need to develop solutions
that bring environmentalists
and industrialists together
with the common goals of living harmoniously
with our planet and creating
human prosperity at the same time.
To achieve these goals
we need to redesign our products
and packaging from the very beginning.
This piece will be on exhibit here
at the UN for thirty days.
During that time approximately
another 21 billion bottles
will be added to landfills.
And if I left the piece
it would still be here
400 years later.
It would probably outlast the UN.
It is my hope that in 20 years
I will be invited by the UN
to recreate this piece
but instead of having the bottles
picked up by a recycling company
at the end of the exhibit,
I will just scatter the bottles on the grounds
of the UN since they will biodegrade
and become nutrients for the soil and plants.
The Mexican writer Octavio Paz
stated in his essay
The Few and the Many,
"People recognize themselves in works of art
because the works of art offer
them images of the hidden totality."
My hope is that as people walk
the hand-tree path through this mass
of plastic bottle waste,
they will realize
that it is time for us to change our habits,
to change how we think of waste
and to demand that our governments
our industrialists and we as individuals,
invest in redesigning the way we live.
Since even the smallest innocuous act
of buying a drink can accumulate
into a massive problem that
effects the entire planet.