You're sitting on "trash"

Do you remember the first toothbrush you ever used?

Do you ever think about it? Do you spend time thinking about

any of the other toothbrushes you might have used in your life?

What started as a middle school art exploration evolved into

a waste upcycling workshop. Over 1400 single use tetrapaks were

collected, cleaned, cut, joined and shaped into functional furniture.

For students growing up in a time of exponential industrial

and consumer waste, this journey was a powerful reminder

of what we can achieve if we put together our many faculties

to find simple, local solutions to large, global problems.

This also helped shift our image of what it means to be a consumer

in today’s hyper-capitalistic economy. Is the convenience of plastic

and aluminium packaging worth the environmental collapse we

have at hand? What is the true cost of each product we buy

from our neighbourhood store? Are there valuable materials

that we usually waste that could be re-used/re-purposed?

Where does the waste go once it leaves our doorsteps?

What does a landfill look like? What does it smell like?

What does it feel like? Who works at said landfills?

What do their lives look like? And their deaths?

About your first toothbrush, and all the others anyone’s ever used,

they still exist in almost the same form, lying in a landfill

in some remote/neighbouring part of this beautiful planet.

As cliched as it sounds, there really is no planet B.

There is no Captain Planet.

The onus lies with us.