A Mexican designer found an environmentally friendly business opportunity in the thousands of tons of trash that left the recent electoral campaign in her country. Caps and bags with the face of the president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum or his rival Xochitl Galvez They are part of the collection that Mizael Perea made with canvas and banners collected on the streets of Ciudad de Mexico.
In his workshop in the capital, Perea, 33, tells AFP that he ““it had a big impact” the amount of waste left by the campaign, so he thought about how to take advantage of it with his knowledge as an industrial designer.
The publicity campaign for the June 2 election is believed to have left some 25,000 tons of trash in Mexico City alone, a megacity of 9.2 million people plagued by waste and pollution problems, according to an estimate cited by the NGO Greenpeace.
Perea then decided to repurpose the propaganda to make bags and caps. Some objects show the face of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador or the altered image, with exaggerated features, of Gálvez. He also sewed half of a cap promoting the leftist Sheinbaum with another of her opponent. “I think there are alternatives (…) that are ecological or that pollute much less” to campaign, he notes.
The designer collected the material especially on pedestrian bridges, after noticing that one day a campaign team was placing propaganda, which was soon torn or removed to make way for another candidate’s propaganda.
“I took advantage of every outing I had to go and collect whatever I could.“,” explains Perea, who sells the products online or at a well-known street market. A bag costs the equivalent of US$22. The designer also reused material given to him by the campaigns themselves.
Prior to the vote, Greenpeace activists threw propaganda at the headquarters of two parties and displayed banners with phrases such as “electoral garbage is a bad election.” Mexican parties are required to present a recycling plan for their advertisements, which must also be made from biodegradable materials.
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Source: Gestion
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