We all throw away an incredible amount every year: food, packaging and so on. According to current statistics, each person in Germany produces an average of 476 kilos of household waste. The situation is very similar in other rich industrialized countries such as Great Britain, France, Canada, Russia and the USA – and has been for many years. The fact that the amount of rubbish has not decreased despite the supposedly new awareness motivated the activist Rob Greenfield to revive an art action from 2016.
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Rob Greenfield wants to show how much waste is produced in everyday life
Because the activist walks through the US metropolis of Los Angeles wearing a garbage suit. The garbage suit that Greenfield presented in New York in 2016 consists of transparent, tear-resistant bags that he attached to his clothes – and the art action works like this: On April 20, Greenfield slipped into his garbage suit. For a month he drank, ate, and consumed food and other necessities like an average American. But the garbage he produced didn’t end up in a bin, but in his garbage suit.
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According to Greenfield, after 30 days, 70 pounds of garbage accumulated, that’s the equivalent of 31.75 kilograms! More than half of it was food packaging: plastic bags, Coke cans, but also coffee mugs from large chains or disposable plates from the to-go business of various shops.
Rob Greenfield wants to wake people up with a garbage suit
With this campaign, Rob Greenfield wants to shake people up, show them how much waste a single person produces, and thus give people the “opportunity for self-reflection”, as he says in a video on his Instagram page. After all, people don’t carry their rubbish around with them all the time, but dump it in rubbish bins.
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At the end of his experiment, the garbage suit is properly inflated, and Greenfield, who has been reducing his own garbage to a minimum for around ten years, can hardly get through narrow corridors, as can be seen in the video. This mountain of rubbish clinging to everyone, he says, can no longer be ignored.
