PETpla.net Insider 06+07 / 2014

PET THE NEXT GENERATION 35 PET planet insider Vol. 15 No. 06+07/14 www.petpla.net Recycling of PET bottles into jewellery All that glitters is not gold Florie Salnot was born in France. She is a designer working in the area of design research, product and service design. She owns a degree in History of Arts and Anthropology from the Sor- bonne in Paris and a MA in Prod- uct Design from the Royal College of Arts in London and now divides her time between Hamburg, London and Paris. www.floriesalnot.com Florie Salnot is a designer concerned with social issues. For her Plastic Gold project she works with women from Western Sahara who have been living for almost 40 years in refugee camps at desert sites in Algeria, waiting to get their land back. Inspired by the traditional jewellery worn by these women, Salnot has devised a craft they can practise despite their limited resources. With only empty PET bottles, hot sand, simple tools and spray paint, they create neck- laces and bracelets. Plastic bottles, in the form of litter, are in plentiful supply around the refu- gee camps in the Sahara desert. That gave Florie Salnot the idea to use them in an art project: “I knew that the Sahrawi people were already making jewellery before and I began looking at their traditional crafts, which led me to start experimenting. The idea was to devise a technique that they could make themselves within the refugee camps with the resources they have available, even though they have almost nothing.” To transform the bottle into a material suitable for jew- ellery, it is first painted and then cut into thin strips with a cutting tool. Any type of drawing can then be made by positioning some nails in a nail board. The plastic stripe is placed all around the nails and the whole is submerged into hot sand to mould the pattern. The plastic strip reacts to the heat by shrinking all along the nail drawing and keeping its shape. The design of the jewellery was inspired by the Saharawi patterns tra- ditionally drawn on leather. The idea is to set up a production facility with the Sahrawi community to enable them to generate an income stream. Plastic Gold was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize 2013, an interna- tional award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition. Stages of the Plastic Gold technique: painting of the bottle, cutting, moulding with hot sand The hot sand stage during the first workshop in the refugee camp of Dakhla Ziurla necklace made from PET