The Facts

Introduction:

          Have you ever visited a body of water and seen all the trash and debris? In 2020 in the Chesapeake Bay alone, 256 tons of trash were collected by the Inner Harbor Water Wheel Family, and 48,690 of those items were plastic bags (Price-Fay, 2022). These plastic bags add toxic contaminants to the water and can act as choking hazards to many aquatic species. This project advocates for the use of reusable bags to reduce the negative impact of plastic on the bay. Plastic bag litter becomes microplastics, toxins, and choking hazards which kills many species. It primarily focuses on turtles, as they are the UMD mascot, prevalent in the Chesapeake Bay, and are greatly impacted from the pollution. By creating reusable bags out of plastic bags, this project also demonstrates how functional art can advocate for change and can reduce the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Literature Review:

         It’s challenging to track the exact origins of yarn made of plastic (plarn) projects because it occurred in many different places, but some cultures, such as West Africa, developed the idea based on their background of artisans crocheting and the evident waste buildup. This idea helps eliminate the pollution caused from the bags and repurposes them instead of them cluttering up landfills. Artists such as Amy Orr at the Moore College of Art and Melissa Haims have taught their students how to create plarn and incorporate it into their art galleries. Amy is a quilter that works with fabrics and other broken things to salvage them and create art. Haims is more known for her knitting, but together they combined these skills to create plarn with their students and knit from it (Bauers, 2021). In the interest of sustainability, many other artists have taken to using recycled materials to create useful products. This project pulls from those ideas to incorporate waste and a problematic material to create reusable crocheted bags from plarn.  

Methods:

          The process of creating plarn involves cutting plastic bags into strips that can be spun down into a more condensed and sturdier strand that can be woven (Jodi, 2019). A spindle created using a pencil, safety pin, and a reused lid taped as the base, allows the strands to twist and tighten into yarn-like material. The finger crocheting process avoids using crochet needles and limits the amount of waste and materials used. Lastly, to represent the protection of turtles, each bag has a symbolic turtle keychain created from repurposed trash.

Audience & Impact: 

          As a public health science major and a member of a Certified Green Terp organization on campus, this project reinforces my dedication to improving and protecting the environment through simple lifestyle changes. This project specifically targets frequent shoppers. The turtle keychains emphasize the importance of protecting wildlife species, like our UMD mascot Testudo the terrapin. For this reason, a subgroup of focus is people living in Maryland and near the Chesapeake Bay. Art scholars has emphasized the importance of the correlation between activism and art. By creating these bags, it has taught me how to problem solve and improvise when encountering an issue and I learned how to crochet with my fingers as well as create plarn. I plan on implementing changes in my life by using these bags when shopping.