Cigarettes and Paper - design interventions

My next idea to publicise the amount of litter was through cigarette butts, as i found they take 12 years to biodegrade and cigarette related rubbish contributes to 70% of rubbish in UK towns. I decided to use the waste items themselves to create the piece which, was quite frankly a pretty disgusting job although you'll be glad to know i did use gloves!


The video below shows the making of my intervention followed by the final pictures, illustrating the fact that 120 tons of cigarette litter is dropped every day in the UK. Looking back over the design i under estimated the amount of butts i'd collected and could have produce a larger scale outcome and i may try and revisit it as i progress.

My following intervention focuses on paper as an issue of litter. I decided to make a small, yet reasonably life-size tree out of scraps of thrown-out paper and card, using the scale of it to help emphasise the problem. I believe this could work well as a series, ideally 6 pieces to get across that fact that the average family throws away the equivalent of 6 trees worth of paper a year. If i decide to continue with paper as my chosen form of litter, I might try combining interventions with trees themselves.