Plastic! We often talk about how shit it is for the world – and we regularly talk about artists and creators who are turning it into fashions. But this all seems so distant, doesn’t it? Personally I am not going to shred my old milk cartons and turn them into a dress… mostly because I don’t have the technology to do so, let alone the fashion skills. Until now. Are You Mad is the world’s first high street plastic recycling studio. Based on the very central London location of swinging Carnaby Street, the space, which launches this week, is the first closed-loop plastic recycling experiment in an urban community, ie, it’s up close and personal – meaning you can connect with recycling, rather than it just be something that happens elsewhere. For two months they will collect plastic from local businesses, residents, tourists and shoppers, clean it and pass it through a series of machines that shred and remelt the plastic to be used as you wish. Maybe you want to make some glasses frames from used Pret spoons, or a fruit bowl from old coffee cup lids. Everything produced in the shop, including the shopfit itself, will be made from plastic found in the Soho area. Are You Mad highlights how easy it should be to recycle plastic, and that if you are a creator, it can be a medium that is easy to get hold of. How often have you mindlessly chucked a piece of plastic in the recycling bin, never to think of it again? Well, maybe now is the time to start looking at it in a different light – perhaps that milk carton could be a sexy dress after all.
“Perhaps that milk carton could be a sexy dress after all”
Elsewhere in plastic reducing news, three different types of microbes have been found that prefer eating the chemicals in plastic over their usual food of rotting organic matter. Yum! This means that one day perhaps these bacteria could be used to clean up lakes and rivers that have become polluted with delicious plastic microbes. In a dream world, they wouldn’t have to of course – and perhaps we are one step closer to that utopia, with the rise in companies making plastics out of pea-protein, seaweed and agricultural waste and mushrooms. The flexible plastic packaging market – your clingfilms and sachets etc – is expected to grow at 4.5% a year, and by 2060 plastic production may have tripled. Ew! Using pea protein to create a clingfilm-esque product that can be eaten by bacteria in a few days (it dissolves when cooked so no more fiddling about unwrapping stock cubes, you just toss it right in), or a packaging that is as strong as polystyrene yet totally compostable when you’re done, is a game changer. Sadly, we are a way off these natural ingredients being used on an industrial level, so in the mean time, gather up your plastic waste and head down to Carnaby Street!