WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. — The City of West Columbia and an artist created a work of art to bring more awareness to single consumption issues.
Street Squad has been following the story since the city requested for residents to bring in plastic bottles for a special project.
People brought by used plastic bottles to City Hall that were 16 or 20 oz., and were either clear or green.
This past Saturday, the city revealed what they were using the bottles for.
Karl Larsen, the artist who put the piece together, has been an artist for about a decade. The work of art he created is made up of roughly 11,750 plastic single-use bottles. Every bottle had to have their labels removed and caps screwed on.
Larsen welded the framework so the bottles could be arranged to look like a large scale bottle that people could step inside of. It took the artist nearly 13 days or 200 hours of work to put the whole piece together.
According to Anna Huffman, the art piece was paid for by hospitality tax money.
The giant bottle now sits at the West Columbia Riverwalk Park near the Gervais Street bridge.
While he started working on the project recently, Larsen says the idea for something like this came a decade ago.
"It started about ten years ago when I was picking up litter prolifically and I realized about 80 percent of what I was collecting was recyclable," Larsen said. "I realized that there was a problem but I didn't really have the method or the means to figure out how to put a message out there that I think would be useful."
The City of West Columbia is encouraging people to use the #3seconds to bring more awareness to the issue. According to Larsen, three seconds is the amount of time it takes on a national scale to find roughly 12,000 bottles. For every three seconds, an artwork like Larsen's can be created.
Recently, the city has started a campaign to help clean up around the city. Almost two weeks ago, West Columbia crews found more than two tons of garbage under the I-26 overpass on US 1.
Larsen wants people to think deeper about how they consume things and to think about ways to discard plastic once they are finished with it.
"It's not about recycling, it is about consumption. This space was designed to be thoughtful for a lot of people to come in here and reflect and contemplate on their consumption habits and their waste practices," explained Larsen. "Frankly, I wanted to kind of throw their trash back at them so they could see it, they could come inside and be immersed by it and rethink the way they consume and discard."
Larsen thinks the Riverwalk is the perfect place for art with this kind of message.
"Just allowing people to still visit a natural space but be reminded to clean up after themselves, to be mindful of how they consume and what the detrimental affects of single use and convenient space plastics are to the environment and ultimately to us," said Larsen.
"I purposely designed this and placed it here so that it would obstruct your view and would restrict your view. It's basically a large piece of trash by the river."
Larsen's hope is people will limit their consumption and think of new ways to discard things to protect our environment and preserve it in the future.