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Thursday, October 23, 2014

FINish the Waste

In this Design and Engineering unit we learned about the Fibonacci series, the golden ratio, exponents, scientific notation, area, and volume. The purpose of our assignment is to create something that represents and illustrates a global issue we are facing: material waste. To do this, our class was divided into groups, and each chose a material or item that is wasted a lot; my group chose plastic bottles. I am most proud of the installation I made out of water bottles for the action project because I think it’s interesting and a very special fish (named Fin).
HP: Sketch from Bottom (2014)
During this unit, we did some research to understand a little more about our item. Two very interesting and shocking statistics we read were that more than 60 million plastic bottles end up in landfills and incinerators every day (Franklin), and six times as many plastic water bottles were thrown away in the US in 2004 as in 1997 (Franklin).

We selected this material because I use at least two daily which really adds up over time, and because of the insane amount people all over the world use every day. When we found out just the daily amount we were shocked. Plastic is very bad for the environment. It comes from natural, chemically modified, and completely synthetic materials and it ends up in landfills or incinerated. Plastic’s main ingredients are ethylene, propylene, butadiene, vinyl chloride, terephthalic acid, adipic acid, sebacoyl chloride, hexamathylene diamine and bisphenol A (What are the ingredients used to make plastic?). However, there are many others. The first plastic based on a synthetic polymer was made from phenol and formaldehyde, with the first viable and cheap synthesis methods invented in 1907, by Leo Hendrik Baekeland (Plastic 2014). We want people to realize how bad wasting so much plastic and discarding so many water bottles is. Our planet wastes way too much of it. We want people to stop buying plastic water bottles and use a sports water bottle so they can use it over and over. Or to buy a filter and just drink filtered tap water.

As I stated earlier, 60 million (6 x 10^7) plastic bottles end up in landfills and incinerators every day. That means about 22 billion (2.2 x 10^10) plastic bottles are used in just one year! Moreover, we keep increasing the amount of plastic bottles that are manufactured and then throw away; as previously mentioned six times as many plastic water bottles were thrown away in the US in 2004 as in 1997. This increase is also shown in the graph below.
"Giving Back - a promise from Terra Polyester S.A. de C.V.." Internet: Terra Polyester
My group's installation is a fish made of water bottles. We used 6 water bottles to represent the 60 million plastic bottles that end up in landfills and incinerators every day. Each bottle represents 10 million. The design was inspired by the ocean, because oceans are the biggest bodies of water and fish swim in these waters. Any time people think of fish they also think of water. And if we run out of water, we will no longer have fish. Furthermore, plastic, which is our material, is a danger to aquatic life. The amount of plastic in the water often ends up inside aquatic animals which leads to their deaths (Conntoro). Plastic constitutes approximately 90% of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface, with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile (Oceans: Plastic Pollution).

The only obstacles we ran into during our project involved the building of our installation. Our first issue was with the shape of the fish: we couldn’t figure out how exactly we wanted the head and tail to look. Our next obstacle was with gluing: the hot glue melted our plastic so it was difficult to glue stuff together. Aside from that we had no problems with our project.

AG: View from Top (2014)
AG: View from Side (2014)
AG: View from Front (2014)

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