The G7 summit will start on Friday in Cornwall with world leaders converging in the town of Carbis Bay, near St Ives. Here they will talk about key issues such as the Covid pandemic, vaccine distribution and the climate crisis. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italy's Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden will be in attendance. Hopefully, they will be able to see from the Carbis Bay Hotel, where the summit is due to take place, a work of art just unveiled for the occasion, entitled "Mount Recyclemore".
Located on the beach near Gwithian, overlooking St Ives Bay, the work, a take on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial inspired by the slogal "recycle more", was commissioned by musicMagpie to artists Joe Rush and Alex Wreckage from the Mutoid Waste Company.
From a distance the sculpture, representing the G7 leaders shines and glistens under the sun as if it were made with aluminium panels, but look better and you will realise the sculpture is entirely made of e-waste, something that should make us think more about the fact that electronic waste products are an environmental, but also a health hazard since they contain toxic additives and substances.
Joe Biden's sculpture was mainly made with green printed circuit boards, but try to analyse the details of the sculpture and you will spot aggregates of tablets, smartphones, keyboards, computers, printers and televisions. Disposing of electronic devices is an issue as serious as dealing with microplastics and ocean plastic: we all seem to have multiple devices, from smartphones and laptops to tablets and consoles, not to mention cables, charges and adaptors.
Last year the United Nations' Global E-waste Monitor 2020, stated that 53.6 million metric tonnes (Mt) of electronic waste was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21 per cent in just five years. Besides, only 17.4 per cent of 2019's e-waste was collected and recycled (in this way we also lost the gold, silver, copper, platinum and other high-value recoverable materials integrated in these devices that were just dumped or burned...). Asia generated the greatest volume of e-waste in 2019, followed by the Americas and Europe.
Things may get even worse in the next few years as we will probably be disposing of all the (broken? obsolete?) devices we used during this past year of lockdowns (but think also about all the devices used in professional fields, including the health industry).The UN report also predicted that discarded products with a battery or plug will reach 74 Mt by 2030.
Joe Rush and Alex Wreckage hope that the sculpture will remind leaders about the fact that electronic devices and their parts should be made with reusable and recyclable materials. The artists actually know quite a few things about recycling as they were part of the Mutoid Waste Company.
Originally founded by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke in collaboration with Alan P Scott and Joshua Bowler, the group of artists and performers emerged from the "Free And Independent State Of Frestonia" (that took its name from Freston Road in London, an area that in the '70s was largely comprised of squatters) and then moved to work in Germany and in Italy as well. influenced by the combined aesthetics or the Mad Max films and Judge Dredd's comics, they created giant welded sculptures made from waste materials, from old cars to industrial machine parts.
Waste can be turned into art as proven by Mount Recyclemore (and as we have also seen in yesterday's post), but it can also be turned into something wearable and we can all do it – a while back I recycled some plastic dice and, more recently, metal bottle caps and made with them a couple of headbands - I call them crowns of waste - a reaction to all the expensive designer headbands on the market at the moment.
The dice one - inspired by Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man, casuality and madness - is reminiscent of a halo (the sun creates wonderful reflections when it hits the transparent dice), but it is also an ironic take on the looks of scary characters à la Pinhead out of Hellraiser with his head covered in a gridwork pattern and pins; the bottle cap one looks instead more industrial but it is equally fun to make and wear. Who says that waste can't generate new and fun designs?
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