Every day, trash bins are filled with plastic cups embossed with recycling symbols. But if you follow the journey of that cup, does it actually get recycled? Most often, the answer is no. It lives its many hundreds of years of life sitting in a landfill or polluting our water. So, we were curious, could we take hundreds of discarded plastic cups and turn them into a shelter? A core goal of this experiment was to create a replicable process with somewhat of a recipe book for anyone to experiment with, as well. 

Despite the utilitarian design, the repurposed material that came out of the process also proved to have an inherent beauty. We wanted to show the public that regardless of their local authorities’ indifference toward recycling, they have the power to change their impact from negative to positive. We wanted to take off the shelf tools - a paper shredder, a heat press, silicone baking sheets, zipties, and…a few hundred plastic cups - and make something with longevity from all these disposable products. If we could create this pavilion over a couple months, imagine what an entire community could do with their collective trash and their imagination. 

In collaboration with Cy Kim