Every single day, millions of plastic takeaway cups are used in food centers across the world.

Receiving a takeaway cup, even when dining in – has become so commonplace that we don’t even think twice about how little sense it makes to use take-out cups within a dine-in setting.

To help start that conversation, we decided to make a selfie-ready art piece in Singapore made from 18,000 plastic cups collected over the course of just a day and a half. These cups, collected from two dozen hawker centers across Singapore had to then be cleaned, arranged and assembled into an art installation that we titled “Plastikophobia“.

Although the word “Plastikophobia” doesn’t officially exist in any dictionary (yet), we felt like it represented how we felt about single-use plastics, especially after spending over two 14-hour days cleaning the small mountain of dirty plastic cups that we had collected with the help of a small army of volunteers.

With the help of Joshua Goh and more than three dozen volunteers, we spent the rest of the week transforming these old dirty cups into a shiny crystal cave – in the hopes of luring unsuspecting passersbys with the promise of a pretty selfie, only to to be overcome by a feeling of Plastikophobia – an extreme aversion to single-use plastics.

With all the pieces assembled and in place, we put the installation to the test by combining a Broncolor Balloon Lamp with a contemporary dancer, Jialin Neo. With tiny LED fairly lights pulsing across the entire installation, we had to drag the shutter and put our flash on the lowest possible power setting to get the effect of a glowing earth surrounded by a sea of plastics.

Hoping to draw a connection between how the plastics that we consume on land inevitably flow into the ocean, we decided to dress up Max Pagel, one of our LED volunteers as an underwater diver complete with fins, and inverted the image to create the illusion of a swimmer inside of an ocean filled with plastics.

Credits:

Installation: Von Wong & Joshua Goh
Social impact Strategy: Laura Francois
Cinematography: Run Rhys
Impact Support: Zero Waste Singapore
“Team LED”: Thomas Svitil, Max Pagel, Sonny Windstrup, Manuel Gussmann, Tobias Herbig
Models: Max Pagel and Neo JiaLing
Timelapses: Henry Poh and Chris Dickinson
Volunteer Wrangler: Karen Ng