2020 Edition

My generation was born in a world were plastic is not just a material, but the very material of our society. However just my grandparents’ generation could tell us the story of a world without plastic. This world – I think we, young people, need to envision it to be able to work our way towards it. First of all, we need to be able to imagine how it would be, a place were plastic is just one material out of many, used for what it is best for, not for everything just because it’s cheap, regardless of its counter-effects. To do so, I believe that us, as communication designers, need to bridge the gap by helping people see how feasible this actually is!

I started by researching on plastic waste. I wanted to base my campaign on the most common plastic waste elements found anywhere in the world, and it turned out that they were all very familiar, everyday objects. I researched in depth the composition of plastic and the various types of polymers, in order to represent them in my campaign (I was particularly interested in portraying cigarette butts, the “forgotten plastic pollution”, which most people don’t even know are made of plastic).