STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

There’s a giant faucet spilling plastic onto the floor of The Argyros Center for the Performing Arts.

Sun Valley Community School students and members of the Climate Action Coalition of the Wood River Valley have banded together to create a Giant Plastic Tap to draw attention to plastic pollution in oceans, lakes and rivers.

A cardboard tap suspended from the ceiling of The Argyros features a waterfall of plastic cups, peanut butter jars, yogurt lids, take-away containers and other plastics.

It’s the latest of hundreds of recreations of Benjamin Von Wong’s Giant Plastic Tap, which was featured on the grounds of the United Nations in Nairobi, Kenya, during the signing of the Global Plastic Treaty Resolution calling for the world to #TURNOFFTHEPLASTICTAP

This particular giant tap was installed in conjunction with the Sun Valley Forum, which started Monday and runs through Thursday. The sculpture can be viewed in the lobby of The Argyros through Thursday.

“Building it was fun,” said Louise Wilson Noyes. “We had a sort of assembly line—the plastic was scattered all over the floor. I was drilling the holes and there were several others doing the threading. Another crew worked on creating the faucet—that was more challenging and more exacting. I think it all came out great, and the plan is to dismantle it so it can be reinstalled elsewhere.”

“It makes you think about your use of plastic,” said Julie Oxarango-Ingram, among those attending the Sun Valley Forum. “And I think it’s great that Sun Valley Community School students were involved.”

The Forum, now in its ninth year, is addressing solutions for climate chaos in a forum themed “Restoring Harmony with Nature.”

Benjamin Von Wong, an international artist and activist, created the original Giant Plastic Tap in 2022 out of plastics sourced from Kiberia, the largest slum in Africa. It was 30 feet tall and more than a hundred residents of Kiberia were involved in the creation as they sourced the plastics, sanitized them and tied them together.

Single-use plastic consumption went up 300 percent during the pandemic.  The planet is swimming in discarded plastic, with the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic dumped into oceans, rivers and lakes every day.

It chokes marine wildlife, damages soil and poisons groundwater. And the average American ingests a credit card worth of plastic every single week in the form of micro and nano-plastics that are in food or picked up by foods as they’re stored, prepared, heated and frozen.

Plastic has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. And even well-intentioned consumers  have trouble escaping it, what with food producers even wrapping vegetables and fruit in plastic.

The local Climate Action Coalition is spending the summer focusing on ways to reduce plastic consumption, joining with the international #PlasticFreeJuly effort.

In conjunction with that, Coalition members are challenging themselves and others to a Trash Audit to see how each one can reduce their plastic consumption. Other options include replacing synthetic cleaning cloths with natural fibers, refilling eco-friendly cleaning products rather than buying new bottles and making homemade cleaners out of equal parts white vinegar and water or a water-and-baking-soda paste.

Learn more at https://www.cacwrv.org.