Indonesian museum made from plastic bottles, bags highlights marine crisis

GRESIK: Environmentalists in Indonesia keen to send a message about the world’s worsening ocean plastics crisis have created a museum made entirely from plastics, to convince people to rethink their habits and say no to single-use bags and bottles.

The outdoor exhibition in the town of Gresik in east Java took three months to assemble and is made up of more than 10,000 plastic waste items, from bottles and bags to sachets and straws, all collected from polluted rivers and beaches.

The centrepiece is a statue called “Dewi Sri”, a goddess of prosperity widely worshipped by the Javanese. Her long skirt is made from single-use sachets of household items. “We want to send information to the people to stop the use of single-use plastic,” said the museum’s founder Prigi Arisandi.

“These plastics are very difficult to recycle… Starting today, we should stop consuming single-use plastic because it will pollute our ocean, which is also our source of food.” The plastics problem is particularly acute in Indonesia, an archipelago nation that ranks second only behind China for its volume of plastics that end up in the seas.