Curbing our plastic problem is no small task. That’s why the Plastic Pollution Coalition is giving away $50,000 to businesses working towards decreasing our plastic dependency.

Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance working towards a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impacts on people, animals and the environment, created the Think Beyond Plastic competition for innovative entrepreneurs working on solutions to the world’s serious plastic crisis.

The amount of plastic on the planet is nothing short of alarming. Each year, around 300 million tons of plastic is produced globally. Here in the U.S., only about the half number of plastic bottles produced wind up in recycling centers. The rest creep into crowded landfills, or our vulnerable oceans, creating serious harm to animals and ecosystems. Chris Jordan (Running the Numbers) has documented this tragedy as it’s impacting the helpless residents of Midway Island to a tear-jerking degree in his forthcoming film, “Midway: A Love Story For Our Time From the Heart of the Pacific.”

“Plastic pollution is a problem that the world has just begun to comprehend. Recycling is not an adequate solution to the increasing consumption of disposable plastic. We seek disruptive solutions that will reduce the planetary plastic footprint,” said Daniella Russo, co-founder and executive director of Plastic Pollution Coalition.

The global alliance, which was formed in 2009, has caught the attention of some major media outlets, companies, festivals and foundations. Jann Wenner, Editor and Publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine and one of the Think Beyond Plastic partners said, “Plastic pollution is a major environmental problem, and we are excited about engaging the spirit of entrepreneurship in the solutions.” Other partners for the contest include Apogee Digital, Bonnaroo, Conservation International, One PacificCoast Bank, FSB, The Sam and Peggy Grossman Foundation, and Tabor Communications.

Entrepreneurs working on products, services, materials and infrastructure solutions that can lead to a widespread decline in use of plastics are encouraged to apply. One existing business will receive $50,000 and the most innovative business concept will receive $10,000. The prizes are being underwritten by the Netherlands A-Spark Good Ventures, an investment company. Winners will be decided by Eben Bayer (Ecovative), Mike Biddle (MBA Polymers), Julie Corbett (Ecologic), Adam Lowry (Method), Dr. Ramani Narayan (Michigan State University), Mike Velings (A-Spark Good Ventures) and Adam Werbach (Yerdle). Submissions must be received by March 10^th and the winners  will be announced at ceremonies in June in Berkeley, California.

For more information, view the competition trailer here.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Image: tompagenet

The post Innovation Competition Aims at Reducing Global Plastic Pollution Problem appeared first on EcoSalon.

A conscious artist uses his or her craft to help and to heal, as a full expression of the rights, the wrongs, and the comedy of our everyday.

Consciousness means a great many things to many different people. For the artists featured in our roundup of a mere twenty, their work signifies something beyond the canvas: a living force. Their work transcends the material and “the self” connecting us to the highest purpose of art. That purpose? Well, it’s in the eye of the beholder and the collector. Certainly their work has aesthetic value as well as monetary; but above all else, its cultural value is priceless.

Ai Weiwei is one of China’s most famous contemporary artists. ArtReview magazine hailed him as number one in their Power 100 list.

His mediums range from sculpture and installation to cultural and political criticism. He’s outspoken on the social and cultural implications of China as a superpower, has been put under house arrest, and is constantly under surveillance. But he has a sense of humor about it, though that, too, has been oppressed.

Scottish artist Katie Paterson sonic boomed her way into the art scene when she displayed her mobile phone number in neon on a gallery wall, inviting visitors to dial it. On the other end: Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest glacier. Her work encompasses installation, sculpture, transmission, and sound. Paterson exhibits her work all over the world and is now the first Artist in Residence with the Astrophysics Group in the UCL Physics & Astronomy department. She investigates ideas of “Ancient Darkness and Early Light in the Universe, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and very distant objects,” creating a new body of work based on her findings.

Kim Abeles is a multi-discipline and media artist who explores the urban environment and social issues. The Smog Collector series brought her work to national and international attention.

Seattle, Washington-based Chris Jordan is considered the “It” green artist. His large (and small) scale works depict mass consumption and waste.

Terike Haapoja is a visual artist who works and lives in Helsinki, Finland. Her mediums include video, installation and stage projects, which uses the innovations of new media and technology to address our interactions (both human and technological) with the natural world.

For more than three decades, Roy Staab has created art from materials as natural as reeds, grasses, twine, hand-woven ropes of hemp, stone, stray, snow and the earth itself. His work leaves little to no impact on the planet and last only as long as the materials do themselves.

Mary Mattingly creates photographs and sculptures depicting futuristic landscapes. She also creates wearable sculptures (e.g., her wearable homes series) and is also well-known for her ecological installations, including Waterpod.

Award-winning photographer Camille Seaman‘s work has been published in National Geographic Magazine, Outside, Seed and more. In 2008, she exhibited “The Last Iceberg” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, which highlights the fragile environment of the Polar Regions.

Adriane Colburn says of her work: “I have developed a series of installations that investigate the complex relationships between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology and the natural world. These constructions, comprised primarily of layers of hand cut paper, digital prints, video and projected light, reimagine maps and photographs of places that are obscured by geography, scale or the passing of time.”

Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira creates recycled wood installations that seem to burst out of gallery walls and ceilings. He sources his weathered plywood from the streets of Sao Paulo.

Riva Weinstein works with found and reclaimed natural and industrial materials. Weinstein further explains, “[these] sacred works of art…document my daily life, and comment on our cultural material obsessions. I strive to open your eyes and your heart to new possibilties, hoping to inspire renewed connections to nature, and human nature.”

George Boorujy was a fisherman, carpenter, potter and hitch-hiker before he became a painter, known for his incredibly detailed ink paintings of North American birds and other animals.

Controversial and fabulously wealthy, he may be. Damien Hirst is also one of the most influential artists of his generation and creator of the iconic shark suspended in formaldehyde entitled: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. 

Peter Coffin references art history as a springboard for humorous re-renderings that bridge contemporary art and everyday life – for example his “Spiral Staircase,” a rendering of Escher’s “Infinite Staircase” in dizzying logic. Additionally, his “Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art” print, an everyman’s ode to Bruce Nauman’s famous neon sign. He also bases projects on aura photography and plant communication, including a greenhouse performance space for musicians and sound artists to communicate with greenery.

Through performance-based paintings, Ana Teresa Fernandez explores the boundaries of gender stereotypes.

Tony Matelli‘s hyper-realistic sculptures often depict primates and objects just “getting by.” Almost dead; perilously unwanted. Via Leo Koenig Inc, “these sculptures serve as metaphors for our own social malaise and our general struggle for survival…mimic[ing our own] conditions associated with trying to locate ones self within our social world.”

Artist Troy Gua says of his series, Pop Hybrids: [it’s] about the reduction of personality into logo, the reduction of individuality into the collective, the reduction of photography into design. They are a subtraction of images: the recycling, re-using and reducing of two or more images into one iconographic collection of shapes.”

Miru Kim is not an animal rights activist, she is an artist who dared to fuse her gaze with that of an animal considered most beastly. “Pig eyes are remarkable,” she said. “They see right into the eyes of a human being….There was no language to bridge that disparity – the mysterious gap between the gaze of a pig and that of mine. But when I mingled with them with my skin, the gap momentarily closed in, as if I had forgotten my own language. My words were lost, and I felt the swinish grunts resonate inside me.”

Julia Fullerton-Batten is known for focusing our gaze on the multifaceted world of women.

The post 20 Conscious Artists Who Go Beyond the Canvas appeared first on EcoSalon.

Trashion. If you’re green and fashionable, you’ve no doubt noticed it’s everywhere you look these days. And this “creative reuse” in fashion may have finally gone too far. It’s time to question, for the sake of eco fashion’s future viability, the plethora of “trash to treasure” initiatives touted as sustainable fashion genius.

It is time to do more with less, and this includes reducing our predilection for “trash to treasure” designs and stories that glorify less than marketable fashion.

The thing that concerns me as someone who also observes how trash is now utilized in eco-art and gallery installations is the message suggesting that we can increasingly find a tidy place for the trash in our lives. Creative reuse needs to move beyond the glorification of trashion and recycled art projects in order to address long term solutions for waste reduction and sustainable economic development. Our primary focus should be on managing this toxic bloom via critically important economic, environmental, and health initiatives.

For sure, timeless design has a transcendent and culturally revealing quality, particularly when it comes to the innovative reuse of materials and cast-off bits. Are we currently aiding or hindering the sustainable fashion movement if we do not make a distinction between designs that measure up as genuine fashion innovation and those that are clever, eye-catching creations that make “trashion” seem fashionable?

Junky Styling’s recycled men’s suit coats: an empowering approach

Creative reuse projects can be large or small. In the case of fashion, several bold designer initiatives have genuinely overhauled the industry’s patterns of waste and excess via the resourceful recycling of textile surplus and unsold stock. Standout labels like From Somewhere, Junky Styling, Goodone, and Reet Aus, to name a few, effectively take yesterday’s unwanted goods and artfully re-shape them into tomorrow’s covetable items. This design strategy is genuinely empowering for the fashion lover who is investing in environmentally sound and fashion-forward design.

From Somewhere‘s upcycling of Speedo’s LZR Racer designs

The recent collaboration of From Somewhere with Speedo to create a capsule collection upcycled from unsold and obsolete Speedo LZR Racer designs might seem like an odd pairing to some. However, an industrial fabric challenge like this clearly demonstrates how unwanted waste can be transformed into eco-luxe couture.

Recycling should and must be an engaging activity, particularly when it comes to labor-intensive DIY projects. Some of the most rewarding fashion moments are definitely those where something useless or outdated takes on new life with imaginative tinkering and whimsy. As Kate Black of Magnifeco recently shared with us:

“When it comes to recycling, we have obviously been doing it for years, in all cultures. Textiles that can no longer be used as garments are incorporated into household items like quilts and pillows and now it’s not just recycled textiles making the news in eco-fashion: candy wrapper handbags, pull-tab accessories are front and center, too.  When recycling or upcycling in fashion falls short, though, I generally find that it is from a taste perspective, not necessarily a design perspective.”

I wholeheartedly support projects that provide fair-trade jobs to artisans who create one-of-a-kind accessories and art-objects out of dumpster and landfill pickings, so I am certainly not attacking these folks for the honest craft and handwork that they do.

Ecoist ‘Botero’ handbag crafted out of candywrappers

I do think, however, that we should exercise caution regarding what is an increasing inclination to sanitize and incorporate trash into art, fashion, and design projects for our own aesthetic amusement. Let’s not forget that this everyday refuse should not exist in the first place, at least not in the volume that we are now grappling with. We need to ensure that we do not become de-sensitized to just how out of control our garbage epidemic is. It is one thing to source from surplus textile stock, recycle trash in the waste stream, and get one’s hands dirty with some gritty DIY projects, but not at the expense of garbage becoming a part of our ongoing design lexicon, much less the focus of our attention.

Via Trendhunter: A condom hat may be great for ginning up clicks, but it’s bad for eco fashion progress.

‘Trash to treasure’ is a dangerous term, and one that might soon need to be upgraded or upcycled within the sustainable fashion glossary. Our long term efforts should continue to be focused on cradle-to-cradle design initiatives, zero-waste garment production, acknowledgment of indigenous technologies and crafts that actually aid specific regions, and sustainable economic development that improves the lives of people everywhere so that they can move beyond having to rely on garbage as a means of livelihood.

Chris Jordan photography

The ready-made object is a surrealist phenomenon. Fashion is about personal expression and the ability to be transported to new layers and states of being. Let’s not allow ourselves to get swept up by “quirky” design projects that demonstrate how clever we can be with Coke tabs, Barbie doll heads, condoms, or heaps of televisions and computer monitors, all in the name of recycling – but in reality only keep our movement one step further from legitimate entree into mainstream fashion or, worse, from being taken seriously by leaders in the fashion world.

‘Household goods’… deceased Estate by Claire Healey and Shaun Cordelro

This is not meant as an attack on the resourceful re-purposing of waste materials for home, fashion, and personal use. Recycling is definitely a significant part of the sustainable fashion story, but recycling without an ability to edit is doing us no good.

There is a time and a place for trashion and art of this nature, but we have a responsibility to shift away from scenes that mimic the dying “portraits of global mass culture” (a la work of photographer Chris Jordan) as we look to a greener future.

Lead image courtesy of Goodone; Household goods images via The Sydney Morning Herald.

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