These Ice Pops Are Filled With Plastic and Other Waste
Hoping to deter pollution, artists turned contaminated water into frozen "treats."
This story is part of Planet or Plastic?—our multiyear effort to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge.
Read this story and more in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Read this story and more in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.
If you licked one of these “treats,” you’d encounter cigarette butts, oil, oozing trash, and a whole lot of plastic and other unsavory pollutants. Three art students collected water from a hundred sites around Taiwan and then froze it into blocks. The artists—Hong Yi-chen, Guo Yi-hui, and Zheng Yu-ti—hope to draw public attention to water contamination and inspire people to generate less waste.
Residential refuse, such as plastic clothespins, oil, and wastewater, is dumped into this canal on Taiwan’s southwest coast.
Tainan Canal
Residential refuse, such as plastic clothespins, oil, and wastewater, is dumped into this canal on Taiwan’s southwest coast.
