Category Archives: Nature Conservation Art

Building houses with plastic bottles

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We all know that plastic and especially plastic bottles are one of the major source of pollution of landfills, rivers and oceans. Since the authorities fail to stop plastic production and ban plastic based products, people have started their own initiatives all around the world to make something constructive out of plastic pollution.

In all continents, people have started building sustainable houses out of recuperated plastic bottles and the results are both surprising and amazing!

This is a double win for the environment and the communities who live of their environment. The twofold positive effect comes from the fact that the bottles used to build these houses are picked up from the beaches, rivers or any surroundings where old plastic bottles can be found. This has a majorly positive impact on the environment as it helps cleaning it from the plastic bottles who take over 400 years to start even disintegrating.

The second positive aspect is that the plastic bottles houses or structures are fairly quick to build and cheap as less “traditional” building materials are used.

The building projects also generally involve quite a few people which strengthens the community bonds and provides great instances of community solidarity.

So all in all these projects are definite win-win for the environment, the people and the community at large who benefit from a cleaner environment.

Here are a few inspiring initiatives all around the world:

In Georgia, a group of students build a greenhouse with plastic bottles:

In Panama, a whole Eco-Village is being build with houses and buildings made with plastic bottles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F4I5Biksok

In Colombia, Oscar Mendez, Architect is building houses with blocks made of discarded plastics!

In India, the Samarpan Foundation is also building houses with recuperated plastic bottles and shows the building process:

All truly inspiring!

By Angelina Cecchetto on 7th October 2016

Magic encounter with The Big Underwear Social Tour

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What happens in Mexico, stays in Mexico! Well, having lived in Mexico, I normally abide by this principle but for once I decided not to, as there are some encounters in life that we have to share. May it be for the sheer magic of the encounter or the sheer magic of the harmony you can’t but feel with some people; my encounter with the Big Underwear Social Tour was definitely one of these!

I met Irmi and Brady, who are the 2 main artists of the Big Underwear Social Tour, in a small fishermen’s village on the Caribbean side of Mexico where I was spending New Year’s Eve celebrations with friends.
A few days later, having to catch a bus and a ferry to go to Belize to dive the Blue Hole, I met with Brady’s daughter Rosie who very kindly offered me a lift back to Playa del Carmen in “the bus”. 

When I saw the Big Underwear Social Tour bus – a 1978 AmGen retired city bus that Irmi and Brady marvelously refurbished to fit their project – my eyes started glittering with joy and a big smile travelled through my face. This bus seemed to me to be the bus of happiness. 

The Big Underwear Social Tour (BUST) is not just a bus, it is an inspiring itinerant artistic act founded by Irmi and Brady in 2010. They now travel across South America for about 6 months of the year in the bus and for the remaining 6 months they perform at festivals and corporate events in Europe.  

When I saw and entered the bus, I was in a state of happiness and excitement that only children have the privilege to feel. I felt privileged to be in it and to share some life moments with some of the most beautiful people I have been very lucky to meet in my travels.

Behind the great artistic show, there is a deeper message in the BUST act and philosophy that touched me particularly and this is a message of true Freedom and Altruism. Altruism towards people and the planet.

When I asked Irmi and Brady what was the main message behind their act and lifestyle, here is what they replied:

–       We are exploring the relationship between money and friendship. We don’t understand the evolutionary changes in our societies. Friendship and family is one thing. Strong family ties are another form of racism, they give you a border (look after our family and not the rest of humanity). Money has become more and more important and is taking away the friendship opportunity. Facebook, is symptomatic of this.

The second main axis of their philosophy is Nature conservation.

–       We often try to inspire people to pick up garbage as we find it to be an international emergency.  Sometimes we go around picking trash from the beach, do local initiatives to try to inspire local people to pick up the trash themselves. Some people just drop things in the street or just anywhere. Before buying new things at the supermarket, go and see if you can find it around you, this gets people together and strengthens friendship. It’s better than making corporations richer.

Exploring the relationship between money and friendship, what a vast and fascinating topic! Irmi and Brady who hosted up to 14 artists when they did their first tour with the bus, have explored the boundaries between money and friendship more than anyone else maybe.

For me, Irmi and Brady incarnate a notion of Hope. They are two independent and talented artists who decided to live free mentally, physically and morally from a constrictive norm and are successful in doing so. They also teach us all a great lesson of altruism in the act of sharing space and taking time to have quality time with others and using their skills and talents to bring attention to the critical situation the planet is in and try to inspire people to act about it.

For what they do, I respect them and thank them. I am very grateful I have spent a couple of days in the Big Underwear Social Tour bus with Irmi, Brady and Rosie, they are some of the most inspirational, altruist and free artists I have met so far.

I wish them bons voyages!

By Angelina Cecchetto on 11th April 2014

When all natural resources will be poisoned will Men survive eating money?

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Photography: ©2013 Angelina Cecchetto All Rights Reserved.

Photography: ©2013 Angelina Cecchetto. All Rights Reserved.

I have been lucky enough to turn one of my passions into a job and to become a dive instructor.  When I dive every day I see a fascinating underwater world that never ceases to amaze me and the divers that I take underwater. The underwater world is simply magical. Unfortunately every day I dive I also see the devastating mark of human consumption everywhere in the ocean.

Every day, I see plastic bottles both at the surface and in the sea. In the sea and in the heart of the reefs I see baby nappies, plastic bags, metal cans, plastic and glass bottles, fishing lines, constructions materials to name just a few. I pick up as many things as I can but this is nothing compare to the amount of trash we pour in the ocean every day.

We are all culprits of this “poisoning”. In the Indian Ocean, the safari boats simply dump their rubbish in the sea. The island resort hotels do the same. Instead of taking their refuse to a processing island they just wait for night to fall so no one sees them and dump the rubbish in the sea a few miles off the island. It’s cheaper. The profit that these island resort hotels make could very easily provide for a refusal budget but the greed for profit at all costs seems as infinite as the universe itself.

The governments worldwide seem to be turning a blind eye to the situation so I am inclined to think that the refuse processing is a big money scam in many countries not to say worldwide.

In Italy the rubbish are being buried in fertile agricultural grounds… In his book “Gomorra” the journalist and writer Roberto Saviano denounces all these refuse processing or rather non processing scams. Of course the fact there is no regulation or control about the rubbish processing results in constant daily poisoning of our soil and seas.

We are poisoning our own environment and killing many other innocent species in the process… In the sea the situation is dramatic. The land to water ratio on the planet is about 30 to 70% so the ocean covers about 2/3 of the planet. With this in mind you would think, the ocean is so big that you would hardly ever see traces of human consumption there. Well that’s precisely where the situation becomes alarming, the reefs are not only the victims of the overall global warming phenomenon which is more subtle to perceive but they are also ridden with human rubbish everywhere and this we cannot ignore.

We all know that the oceans are overfished, we all know about global warming, we all know about species disappearing due to human over consumption and damage so the question is what do we do about it? Individually we can do localized actions but separate we cannot change the big picture. So when are we going to get involved all together?

The main issue beyond the refuse processing is the whole consumer product industry. Packaging. Do we really need 3 layers of plastic around our products? Do we really need to have our strawberries in a plastic container and an extra cellophane layer around it?  Do we really need baby nappies made out of Polyethylene i.e. plastic?

It is time to rethink the whole consumer products packaging worldwide and fast! It is not only killing or endangering many innocent species worldwide; it is also endangering us humans. The bottom line of the issue is that “money rules” in this world as we all know.

My question to conclude is simple:  when all natural resources will be poisoned or extinct will Men survive eating money??

By Angelina Cecchetto on 2nd February 2013