Recently, Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ found that, without environmental action, plastic waste in the ocean could triple by 2040 if the world’s nations don’t curb single-use plastics from entering our waterways. What’s more, those same pieces of plastics degrade and become microplastics, and, yes, humans are now consuming them, whether it’s in the fish we eat or the bottled water we drink.
In a series of ongoing projects meant to raise awareness about single-use waste and ocean plastic, Lisbon studio How & How developed a design for Plastic Free July focused on the wonderfully indestructible material we’re unknowingly consuming every day.
“Living in Lisbon means we’re in daily contact with the moods, majesty, and misery of our Ocean,” the studio said, describing the project. “The plastics washing up on our beaches is a very real and obvious threat. But there’s a hidden danger that is going unnoticed—the degraded plastic particles we’re all ingesting through water, which have infiltrated the system. And we’re ingesting these at an alarming scale; a credit card-sized amount of them, per person…each week.”
You heard that right. You’re eating your credit card every week. Maybe some of you will stop and think, well, that’s not too much plastic, to which I would add, get back to me after you try eating that old Blockbuster card sitting in the back of your wallet (and if you do, well, Werner Herzog once ate a shoe).
The agency says they found inspiration in pop colors and simplistic shapes, all of which reminded them of the standard plastics we use in our day-to-day lives. The real challenge, however, meant creating illustrations that could fit within a credit card, that way they could underscore the realities of plastic waste using something you literally can’t go without using every time you step into a grocery store. Additionally, they didn’t want the design to be misconstrued or have viewers think that recycled plastics made up the credit card; instead, they wanted to show that it’s these more significant pieces of plastic that are breaking down into much tinier, ingestible ones.
Anyway, no one really wants to eat a credit card. Try to use a little less plastic, will ya’?
