Virtually all the materials used for our workshops and the original artworks displayed here have been repurposed from domestic waste and recycling streams or purchased from Stoke-on-Trent’s Scrap Shack.

Over the past year, our team has spent around £100 on industrial and artwork discards cycled through the Community Scrap Shack in Fenton. We have purchased supplementary polypropylene fencing for the reef and polypropylene cable ties for attachments at HomeBase.

Our poster images are printed on polyester canvas supplied by Keele University’s Digital Imaging Services and Andy Lawrence. These posters have been designed to be re- exhibited at other venues in the future, including a university gallery in Manila. These will travel to the Philippines – and back – along with the fish net.

We intend to disassemble the coral reef model for re-exhibition here in the U.K.
Eventually, however, the reef and net components will be sent into the waste stream – always their original destination. Plastics made of RICs 1 and 2 (PET & HDPE) will be sent to recycling while it is likely that the other plastics – polypropylene fencing and cable ties, LDPE bags, mylar balloon bits etc. – will be incinerated, following the path taken by much of our non-recoverable recycling in Staffordshire.

We have only diverted these materials from waste temporarily. Much more of this stuff is out there, making its way towards incineration and possibly landfill or the terrestrial environment and, from there, into our oceans.

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- Deirdre McKay, Richard Redwin, Rachel Ballard, Lei Xiaoyu and Hacking Plastic