Plastic Bottle Installation Turns Waste Into Art

Watershed Assembly at MSLK 5/24/09 from MSLK on Vimeo.

Need a striking visual to remind you to get off the bottle? The graphic designers at MSLK collected 1,500 water bottles for a new installation called "Watershed" that will be displayed at the Figment Art Festival in New York City from June 12-14. According to the artists, 1,500 is the number of water bottles consumed in the United States every second.

This isn't the first time MSLK has made a visual statement about plastic. The group tackled plastic bag pollution with "2663 Urban Tumbleweeds," an installation that was exhibited at the Burning Man festival in 2008. The 2663 bags collected represented one second of waste.

The installations created by MSLK have a sort of astonishing beauty, but considering that in the minute or so it took you to read about these projects, 90,000 plastic bottles and nearly 160,000 plastic bags have entered the waste stream, the reality they represent isn't so pretty.

--Della Watson