Fill colorful plastic bags with air, toss ‘em in a dumpster and light ‘em up – now that’s my idea of art! An anonymous group of artists and photographers known as Luzinterruptus organized the installation several months ago in front of the Gewerbemuseum (English translation is ‘Museum of Applied Arts and Design’) in Switzerland. The purpose of the outdoor exhibit was to bring attention to the environmental issues associated with plastic bags.

The Gewerbemuseum invited Luzinterruptus as part of the Oh, Plastiksack! exhibit running at the museum. Luzinterruptus has done several large scale installations over the years, and each one features an environmental theme, lights and the color black as a background medium. The ‘Plastic Garbage Guarding the Museum’ exhibit features all three of these components.

The group of artists collected about 5,000 plastic bags from residents in the area. The Gewerbemuseum offered free museum passes for anyone donating plastic bags, so as you can imagine, the bags came flooding in!

Luzinterruptus chose the most colorful and interesting looking bags from the bunch and filled them up with air. Each bag was placed in one of two dumpsters located on either side of the entrance to the museum. A light source was added to each one to make the colors pop.

Each visitor to the museum received a helium filled glowing plastic bag on a string as a souvenir.

The outdoor installation lasted a total of four months. The premise of the exhibit was to show how plastic bags with colorful, eye-catching advertising are appealing at first but eventually begin looking decrepit when dumped in the trash and left to decompose. Plastic bags can take hundreds of years to decompose in nature.

Plastic bags are accepted by many curbside recycling programs but not all. Check with your local recycler to see if you should be throwing your plastic bags into the recycle bin instead of the dumpster.

Via: Huffington Post