This series hints of the small but always significant impact of consumer waste on sensitive natural processes. These pictures might be the equivalent of human portraits, but they are plastic bottles tossed from cars onto grass verses near my home. The notion draws from the last page of Darwin’s Origin of Species. There he spoke of an entangled bank of species, such that anyone might see on a country walk. The metaphor expresses the richness, diversity and subtle interspecies interactions among all organisms present, and it provides a metaphor for biological complexity.
This collection of scanograms, which began in 2003, portray the human ‘contribution’ to the entangled bank of today. In 2007 it was estimated that 13bn water plastic bottles were sold in the UK of which only 3bn were recycled. We define plastic bottles as ‘waste’. This is entirely a human conceit since there is no waste in nature. According to the University of Nottingham one single one litre plastic bottle requires 162g of oil and seven litres of water and its manufacture produces 100gs of carbon dioxide (CO2).
