Life Before Plastic: Community Engagement Event
Mar 25, 2023
Image: Cath Barcan 'Still life with peaches' 2017
About
When: Saturday 25th March 11am-12:30pm
Cost: Free
Who: Intergenerational event
Where: Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
How did we live before glad wrap, the plastic shopping bag, those tiny fish-shaped takeaway soy sauce containers and stickers on fruit? Quite easily! We used and reused baskets, cloth bags, paper wrapping and glass jars, returned and refilled, and were reluctant to throw anything away after single use. This workshop run by designers and eco-researchers, will facilitate a community conversation, inviting you to share your memories and knowledge of more sustainable packaging and shopping practices and to have fun designing community solutions for life after single use plastic in Wagga.
More Information
The aim of this workshop explores how Wagga Wagga might be part of the solution to the single use plastic crisis. Individual consumer actions are helpful but not enough to tackle the plastics problem. We need collaborative actions with businesses, households and government. We also need imagination and creativity to explore what lost practices and systems need to be brought back and what new ones need to be developed – so please come along, share your local knowledge and have some fun.
In 2023 Wagga Wagga Regional Gallery is running a year long series of exhibitions about the environment and climate change, including Plastic: unwrapping the world. Co-curated by the gallery with researchers from Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, this exhibition explores how the mass introduction of single-use plastic packaging and disposability transformed long-standing social practices of shopping, eating and storing in less than two generations. This material transformation also created a global plastics waste crisis.
Please note: By participating in this workshop your ideas and creative inventions may be incorporated into the final report of this research project. Everything included will be anonymous.
For more information about the Western Sydney University research project click on this link:
Acknowledgements
Plastic: Unwrapping the World is a collaboration between Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and Professor Gay Hawkins from the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.
The exhibition is one outcome of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP210100175) ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’.