About the artist
Precious Plastic
Dear Plastic is made possible with the help from::
- Van Happen Containers en Jan Linders – for collecting the plastic
- Ergon – for making sure that the plastic bottles are clean before going into the Dommel
- Precious Plastic
- GLOW Eindhoven
Some facts:
- There are 29,003 bottles in the Dommel: 16,470 1.5-liter bottles and 12,533 0.33-liter bottles
- Van Happen Containers and Jan Linders collected this plastic.
- The 16,470 1.5-liter bottles are the result of one day of bottle collection at 59 Jan Linders supermarkets in the Netherlands.
- Van Happen Containers sorted the 4,760 small PET bottles from residual waste using an advanced sorting installation.
- Small PET bottles do not carry a deposit; the EU is working on a proposal to change that.
- Containers are placed around the project to collect plastic waste.
- Precious Plastic uses this for research on people’s behavior during an event: Does the project have an impact on litter?
- Employees from Ergon and the Participation Company helped assemble and fill frames and ensured the bottles were clean before being placed in the Dommel (caps closed, contents removed, paper labels removed, residues cleaned). So, even on the human side of the project, we are socially responsible.
- SPA bottles have a paper label that detaches when in contact with water.
- Precious Plastic will create new value from this waste by creating a new artwork or usable object together with GLOW.
- PET bottles are difficult to process.
- Precious Plastic aims to find a solution for this through this project.
- To date, only 9% of global waste is recycled, with the rest ending up as litter.
