Everything In This Grocery Store—From Fresh Produce To Snacks—Is Plastic Waste
Image via University Musical Society
Need a quick bite? Pro tip: Don’t get the snacks from this new grocery store. It will take tens to hundreds of years for them to break down in landfill, so they can’t be great for digestion.
The shop’s name, The Plastic Bag Store, points at its specialty. Everything stocked here is locally-sourced from nearby streets and dumpsters, guaranteeing the freshest waste.
The public art installation, created by New York-based theater and film director Robin Frohardt, is now on display in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as part of a wider No Safety Net exhibit by the University of Michigan’s University Musical Society. It aims to draw focus to the heaps of disposables that fill up garbage piles and clog up oceans and the dangers of inaction.
Video screenshot via University Musical Society
The faux food items, upcycled from old plastic bags, include crushed balls of garbage resembling fruits and vegetables, as well as snack and cereal packaging with reimagined trash-themed names.
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You’ll be hard-pressed not to stare at boxes of ‘Yucky Shards’ (named after Lucky Charms), ‘Bitz of Plastic Crap’ (Ritz Crackers), ‘Uncle Bags’ (Uncle Ben), and a ‘Filthydelphia roll’ (Philadelphia roll). Frohardt tells the Associated Press one product she didn’t have to rename was the store’s baguettes because the original name says it all.
The Plastic Bag Store is commissioned by Times Square Arts, with support by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Art, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, among several others. It was first exhibited at Times Square in 2020, and has since traveled to Austin, Texas; Chicago; Los Angeles; and Adelaide, Australia.
The artist notes she got the idea to build a full grocery store from single-use plastics after having her shopping double-bagged, and then triple-bagged, by a cashier years ago. That got her thinking about how much packaging is used in daily life without much hesitation.
The installation includes a bakery and deli, each promising inedible bites of plastic DIY salads and cakes.
The WorldWatch Institute estimates that 100 billion plastic bags are discarded by Americans each year, making it difficult to clean up on aisle nine and beyond.
Since the store is envisioned to be as informative as it is deceptively appealing, it will showcase a series of puppet-starring shorts warning of how plastic waste will threaten life for future generations at various intervals of the day.
Frohardt says her goal for the project is that it may one day be irrelevant, though she’s doubtful that will happen.
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[via Associated Press and MLive.com, images via University Musical Society]
