If you happen to be near the iconic Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, then you stand a chance of getting a photo taken with a ‘giant human poo’ which has been dumped on the shore to mark World Environment Day on Monday.
You may well think that plopping a poo on the coastline isn’t exactly a good look on a day designed to draw attention to protecting nature and the planet, but it’s actually made of rescued plastic from south east Asia, and intended to spread a pretty important message.
On a webpage explaining their publicity stunt, the New Zealand-based company Better Packaging said: “We’re kicking up a stink because humanity has a problem. We just can’t seem to stop making more and more new plastic, most of it never gets recycled and far too much of it ends up in our oceans.
“Basically, we treat plastic like s***.”
We see what you did there.
They continued: “This giant poop represents the amount of plastic that enters the ocean every 30 seconds. Scary huh.
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“Most of it enters via land, and most of that from Asia. These regions don’t have any formal waste management or recycling infrastructure – plastic just gets thrown ‘away’, buried or burnt.
“Eventually, with the next monsoon rains, that plastic will get washed into a ditch, then a stream, a river, and then the ocean. We want to stop that happening!”
Hence the four-metre high turd, which is made mostly of recycled plastics and second-hand fishing nets, with a wooden tree structure at its base to “keep it upright”.
You wouldn’t want a floppy plop, after all (sorry).
The artwork – if we can call it that – is titled "Plastic Pile of S***, 2023". Its unveiling follows a report by the United Nations’ Environment Programme (UNEP) in May which it said plastic pollution could fall by as much as 80 per cent by 2040 if both countries and companies make “deep” shifts in policies and markets through the use of “existing technologies”.
“The way we produce, use and dispose of plastics is polluting ecosystems, creating risks for human health and destabilising the climate,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UNEP.
Oh, and if you fancy witnessing the ‘excrement’ but are nowhere near Australia, then you might be in luck, as Better Packaging have said they’d “love to take it ‘on tour’” after going into temporary storage.
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