Almost 20 years ago, artist and UCLA alumna Dianna Cohen gave up the conventional artist’s tools, and began to work with a material taken for granted by most: trash.
Using recycled bits and pieces of plastic bags, Cohen was excited by her discovery of a new artistic medium and said she believed that she had truly found an archival material for her work.
“But some of my older pieces started to fragment into smaller bits,” Cohen said. “I thought maybe this meant that they were pieces that would actually break down in some organic fashion.”
Intrigued by her personal discovery, Cohen set out to educate herself about her new artistic material. But what she found was not what she had originally expected.
“I found that although some types of plastic break down into smaller bits, basically plastic lasts forever,” Cohen said.
And as she discovered, these nondegradable materials were significantly contributing to a growing problem of pollution not only found on land but also in water.
“There are actually two large swirling gyres of plastic pollution in the North Pacific Ocean,” Cohen said.
Shocked by her discovery of plastic’s inorganic decomposition and the immense oceanic pollution known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Cohen set out to educate others of what she had learned, helping to create the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
With the goal of eliminating the toxic impact of plastic pollution, the Plastic Pollution Coalition has been active in raising awareness and understanding among the general population and UCLA community of the harms of plastic use.
After participating in Opportunity Green, a business conference held on the UCLA campus to help develop environmentally friendly practices, the Plastic Pollution Coalition held a film series at UCLA beginning with a screening of “Tapped” at the James Bridges Theater in December.
In addition to raising awareness of the effects on the environment, the group also brings to light the harms of plastics on the human body.
“Harmful chemicals leached by plastics are already present in the bloodstream and tissues of almost every one of us,” according to the organization’s Web site.
Through the growing pollution in the world’s ocean environments, the toxic chemicals used in the production of plastic materials can leach into the ocean and can end up in the human body, according to the coalition.
“(Plastics can) also become a little magnetic attractor for all kinds of other organic substances,” Cohen said. “So you end up with all of these kinds of hormones, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, including DDT, flame retardants, all kinds of this that get washed down into the ocean and are attracted to the surface of these little fragments of plastic.”
But stopping the problems associated with plastic pollution is not an easy task.
“The primary way is to stop using discardable plastics that are not biodegradable in the environment,” said Jim McWilliams, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA.
These discardable plastics, also known as single-use plastics, include numerous widely used products such as plastic water bottles, straws and even the plastic bags used by Cohen in her artwork.
Nonetheless, the Plastic Pollution Coalition believes that eliminating the use of such plastics can significantly help reduce the harms of plastic pollution.
“The first thing we’re asking people to do is to refuse single-use plastics,” Cohen said. “It’s easy enough to use an alternative and they exist.”
According to Cohen, eliminating single-use plastics by means such as using reusable stainless steel water bottles can significantly reduce the amount of plastics discarded into landfills and ending up in the ocean.
“There is no “˜away’ to throw it to and in doing so we poison ourselves,” Cohen said, “We poison our environment and we poison the ecology of our earth.”