I began to be fascinated by plastic, so I spent four months making eight plastic blocks perfectly optically transparent, as a kind of release of stress.

Distort

Lens count

Lens size

Fisheye lens

Distort

(b) plastics drums and jerricans that

As an economic information publisher, Thomson Reuters Foundation siad that China imported 7.3 million tonnes of plastic waste in China, accounting for 56 of the world s total plastic waste import.

What does that convex lens do?

It is down cycled and turned into lesser things, while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again.

Plastik

A screen magnifier that looks like a fisheye lens

At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics.

Because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise, that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect.

We call this gravitational lensing.

Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record.

This is convex lens leadership.

It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic.

It's plastic pollution.

He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal.

Most laboratories insist that protective goggles are worn. Without them, it is too risky to work with most chemicals. Usually, the lens is a special type of plastic that affords protection from both mechanical impacts, and acid and base chemicals.

Whenever possible, refuse single use and disposable plastics.

Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing.

I'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator, and I'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies.

Moreover, most plastic products are made from so called petroleum based commodity thermoplastics. Given that a non renewable resource forms the basis of many plastic products most of which will not last long current plastics usage patterns are not sustainable.

Plastic just is not going to do it.

(b) plastics drums that

And if you really look into it, particularly when it comes to plastic bottles, most of it is only down cycled, or incinerated, or shipped to China.

It's not just that gyre of plastic that I'm concerned about it's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket.

Now because the plastics are so plentiful and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously but people do try to recover the plastics.

And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have the bull's eye on their foreheads are poor people.

It's a plastic bag.

The Dirt on Plastic Waste

It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals.

Plastics have taken the place of many conventional materials.

Recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people.

And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics.

Now look at that plastic chair.

51H flexible plastics large packagings

50H rigid plastics large packagings

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Soybeans, yeah.

glass, plastic, terry cloth.

I like drinking from a stein.

And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case.

I've been working with plastic bags, which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years.