As countries try to find agreement on plastic pollution, creative interventions are turning heads — and turning the conversation toward health harms, fossil fuels, and false solutions.
Nearly every day since July 31, Benjamin Von Wong has been surrounding his 20-foot-tall art installation, “The Thinker’s Burden,” with a little more plastic trash. By Thursday, parts of it could be totally obscured beneath a mountain of garbage in front of the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
Von Wong, a Canadian artist, created his sculpture specifically for this month’s round of negotiations over a global plastics treaty. It features a replica of Auguste Rodin’s well-known sculpture “The Thinker” — only instead of sitting in solitude, the pensive man cradles a baby and is perched atop Mother Earth. A giant strand of DNA coils around him, and at the installation’s base, the ground is littered with bottles, bags, and other plastic debris. Taken together, these elements represent the growing threat of plastic pollution to human health and the Earth’s ecosystems — a message to diplomats as they hem and haw over a United Nations agreement to “end plastic pollution.”
“Plastics are going to have all these unintended consequences,” Von Wong told Grist. “If the goal is to protect human health in the long term, then these are issues that we can’t just run away from.”
“The Thinker’s Burden” is just one of many pieces of art that have popped up alongside the treaty talks. Ever since U.N. delegates agreed to negotiate an agreement more than three years ago, environmental advocates have used a range of media to sway diplomats and the public, tapping into people’s emotions to break the monotony of speeches and presentations. Even the gavel used to approve the negotiations in 2022 was a piece of art — it was fashioned from plastic collected by waste pickers.
Some of the most powerful pieces that have been created for the negotiations, however, have deliberately sought to shift the narrative from a simple one about the problem of plastic litter accumulating in the oceans to something more complex — namely, that the plastic crisis was caused by fossil fuel companies, that it’s damaging human health, and that it can’t be solved through waste management alone.
Von Wong has been at the forefront of this effort, starting with his installation “Turn Off the Plastic Tap,” which was featured at the U.N. Environment Assembly meeting that kicked off plastics treaty negotiations in 2022. That piece was a replica of one he had made the previous year for the Canadian government in which plastic trash gushes from a spigot elevated 30 feet in the air. The towering artwork helped to convey a popular analogy about plastic pollution: Just as it would be illogical to mop up water overflowing from a bathtub without first turning off the tap, the world should deal with its plastics problem by first addressing the material’s unmitigated production.
The piece became a symbol of the treaty negotiations. Photos of it were endlessly circulated by business and advocacy groups and the media, and it got a big boost when the U.N. Environment Programme put it on the cover of its 2023 report, “Turning Off the Tap.”
“I don’t think I realized the importance of this piece,” Von Wong said. “Literally anyone who works on the U.N. plastics treaty — they know my art, which is super cool.”
Von Wong’s work caught the advocacy world’s eyes, too. In 2023, ahead of the second round of plastics treaty negotiations in Paris, the international nonprofit Greenpeace commissioned Von Wong to put together another installation, this time focusing on the who of plastic production. The result: a 15-foot-tall “Perpetual Plastic Machine,” featuring an oil pumpjack connected to two inclined conveyor belts of disposable plastic bottles. From the top of the belts, the bottles tumble into heaps of trash.
“We wanted to basically convey the idea that plastic is made from oil,” said Anna Hristova, a global campaign strategist for Greenpeace International. “And unless you actually have restrictions on production, you can never decrease the plastic that we’re pumping into the world.” Indeed, virtually all plastics are made from fossil fuels, and a peer-reviewed study published last year found that there is a one-to-one correlation between plastic production and plastic pollution: The more plastic the world makes, the more pollution results.
In designing his installations, Von Wong said his target audience is treaty delegates, since they’re the ones with the real decision-making power. “The way of making a difference is through policy,” he said, adding that it’s only worth installing a larger-than-life artwork if it’s in a central location. He’s been pleased to see his art become a focal point for the negotiations — it’s often served as a backdrop for photo ops and media interviews with diplomats, or as a meeting point for political demonstrations. Erin Simon, vice president and head of a plastics and business initiative from the nonprofit World Wide Fund For Nature, or WWF, said her team has a group photo in front of every one of Von Wong’s installations.
Hristova said she’s been happy to see engagement from the public, too. The “Perpetual Plastic Machine” was placed in a touristy area along the Seine River, right by the Musée d’Orsay, and families walking past with their children would stop and read the placards connecting oil and gas extraction to plastic pollution. By the end of the weeklong negotiations, Hristova said that the Seine’s boat tour operators had begun pointing it out on their sightseeing cruises.
Art allows activists to reach “a very diverse audience,” Hristova added, including people who might not otherwise have taken an interest in the plastics problem. It’s also a tool Greenpeace uses in places where it cannot perform nonviolent direct actions, like in countries controlled by authoritarian governments.
In November 2023, Greenpeace shipped the “Perpetual Plastic Machine” to the Gigiri Courtyard in Nairobi, Kenya, for the the third round of plastics treaty negotiations. The next round, in Ottawa, Canada, brought back “Turn Off the Plastic Tap” — the original was being stored in a Toronto museum, and the Canadian government paid to move it directly in front of the downtown conference venue.
Von Wong lost a bid to create new art for the fifth round of negotiations in Busan, South Korea, last year, and the Korean government ultimately selected one from the artist Kim Jung-Ju. Jung-Ju’s installation was a giant whale made of marine plastic litter, which some advocates saw as disappointingly apolitical: It focused on the problem of ocean plastic pollution, which — unlike plastic production — is virtually uncontested among treaty negotiators. “Safe” was the word one observer used to describe it in an interview with Grist.
Other, more provocative examples of plastics treaty art abound: a mixed-media collage of a baby doll enveloped in dirty plastic pollution, accompanied by the message, “Whose fault is this?”; an oversize spoon full of plastic particles next to a sign reading, “Stop feeding us plastic”; cookies shaped like credit cards to highlight the cumulative weight of microplastics that people unknowingly ingest every week. Define art liberally and you could include any number of protests, too, since their purpose is to create a spectacle through creative combinations of people, signage, music, and poetry.
