Eduardo Srur's PET Project

Metro daily newspaper’s Sao Paulo arm reported yesterday that the other day city police found a giant plastic bottle floating down the river’s Tiete River. However, just so you don’t get the idea that this river is otherwise usually spic and span and could be used to boil your veggies, know that plastic bottles are an amphibious species as common in this sickenly polluted waterway as the man-eating bacteria that co-habitate with it. The reports didn’t specify its size, but this was no experimental family-size soda container. It apparently was a test for Sao Paulo artist Eduardo Srur‘s next PET (an acronym for polyethylene terephthalate, a resin used for containers) project, in which he will place 30 gigantic 40-foot-long inflatable plastic PET bottles along the river’s banks for a month to make a point about the need for recycling and the importance of cleaning up the water. Srur’s previous works are super interesting, like the one he did a few years ago in which he set off paint bombs on Sao Paulo billboards. In both cases so far, yeah, I think he’s made his point.