Works, statues and infrastructures all made from plastic waste: this is the museum that has just been built in Gresik, on the island of Java, with a group of Indonesian activists, Prigi Arisandi, a 45-year-old biologist, 2011 Goldman Environmental Prize winner. Three months of collection and more than 10,000 garbage: bottles, straws, bags and other old flip-flops, all collected from rivers and beaches in Indonesia. Enough to dispel the idea that Indonesia rhymes with Bali, white sand and translucent sea. The reality is quite different: every day, tens of tons of waste are dumped on these beaches, invade the mangroves, suffocate the fish, to the chagrin of the fishermen who haul up nets filled with plastic.
Indonesian museum made from plastic bottles, bags highlights marine crisis https://t.co/890GR8wET0 pic.twitter.com/jMRC3ZNgS8
– Reuters (@Reuters) October 4, 2021
Oddly enough, the Prigi Arisandi museum is almost beautiful. Besides, his main piece is pictured in a good part of the international press this week. We see three visitors standing under a dome made of thousands of disposable bottles, crossed by the sunlight, and whose caps, red, blue, yellow, green, bring bright touches of color. It is aesthetic, photogenic and yet it is the signature of the disaster. “The message, explains Prigi Arisandi to Reuters, it is that we must stop using single-use plastic, because it cannot be recycled and we must preserve our oceans, in other words our sources of food.“It’s simple, clear.
He has been repeating the same thing for twenty years, yet since then the problem has only gotten worse. According to Plastics Europe Research Group, in 1980, 60 million tonnes of plastic were produced worldwide. In 2017, 350 million.
“When i was a child, says Prigi Arisandi, my grandmother fished and I bathed in the river, then I entered high school, and in the meantime no young people were swimming in the water, it was so dirty. That’s why I became a biologist. “ Biologist and activist, since the year 2000, he regularly attacks his government for pollution, negligence. A fight that concerns us first and foremost, since Europe exports our so-called recyclable waste every month to the countries of South-East Asia, so it is also our bottles, our bags and our packaging that float there.