Conversation with Benjamin Von Wong

Please enjoy my conversation with Benjamin Von Wong. 

Get ready for a wild, inspiring ride with this artist & activist. From mining engineer to creator of viral installations like Plastic Tap and Plasticphobia, Benjamin shares how he fell (literally!) into a life of purpose, using art to make climate issues unforgettable.

Giant faucets, 10,000 plastic bottles, mermaids, phoenixes, and community-powered change—this one's not to miss.

Benjamin Von Wong's work lies at the intersection of fantasy and photography and combines everyday objects with shocking statistics. It has attracted the attention of corporations, like Starbucks, Dell, and Nike and has generated over 100 million views for causes like ocean plastics, electronic waste, and fashion pollution. Benjamin says that he is an artist focused on amplifying positive impact. His mission is to help make positive impact unforgettable.

https://www.vonwong.com/ 

United Nations https://www.un.org/en 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_High_Commissions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

Cop 16 https://www.cbd.int/conferences/2024

Ocean Plastic Leadership Network https://opln.org/

Downloadable Plastic Tap Project vonwong0.gumroad.com/l/giantplastictap 

This podcast was created by Natalya Khorover. It was produced and recorded by Natalya, as well as researched and edited by her. SALVAGE is a product of ECOLOOP.ART.

If you enjoy this show, please rate and review us wherever you’re listening—and be sure to come back for another conversation with a repurposed media artist.

Music theme by RC Guida

Visit Natalya’s website at www.artbynatalya.com

Visit Natalya’s community at www.repurposercollective.com

Visit Natalya’s workshops at https://www.ecoloop.art/

Transcript

Welcome to Salvage, a podcast for conversations with artists about the repurposed materials they use in their art practice.

Please enjoy my conversation with Benjamin Von Wong. Benjamin's work lies at the intersection of fantasy and photography, and combines everyday objects with shocking statistics. It has attracted the attention of corporations like Starbucks, Dell, and Nike, and has generated over 100 million views for causes like ocean plastics, electronic waste and fashion pollution. Benjamin says that he is an artist focused on amplifying positive impact.

His mission is to help make positive impact unforgettable.

Well, Benjamin, thank you so much for joining me. I am so delighted that you agreed to talk to me twice. First, you spoke to the Repurposer Collective and now you're here to record a podcast. So thank you so much. Yeah. Happy to be here.

So I know that I know some of your history, but I hope that you don't mind that we repeat some of it at the start, just so that, my audience can learn more about you.

Would you say that you were an artist as a kid? No. I think when I first grew up, I was never really good at anything. My parents, you know, put us through the standard Asian, practices. I did, violin. I did martial arts. I was on the swim team. They tried putting us through drawing classes, pottery classes, maybe basically anything, any kind of extracurricular activity.

We probably did it at least once and, never showed any promise as a kid. In fact, I was really ordinary. Just about everything. And so the fact that I'm an artist, even today, feels a little bit surprising. That's awesome. I think I like surprises like that.

I think I remember you telling me before that you went to school for engineering.

Yeah, I went to school for, hard Rock mining engineering, actually. Oh, right. Yeah. Which is nothing I've ever heard before. Yeah. Well, if you think about it like gold, silver, copper, it all has to come from somewhere, right? So we need to figure out how do we get this stuff from miles and miles and miles, below ground and figure out how to get it out to us.

And so I was just basically sitting in front of a computer calculating, how long it would take, how much money, what equipment we would use, how much money we might make, and, just go through that little cycle. It's kind of wild. Wow. Yeah. And then how did you get into photography from there? How did that transition happen?

Yeah, I mean, I was working at a mine in Winnemucca, Nevada, which for those of you who don't know where it is, it's actually, really close to Burning Man. I think it's like an hour away from where Burning man is. And I had gone from being of legal drinking age in Montreal, legal drinking age of 18 to legal drinking age.

And and the US is 21. And so I was 20 years old. I went from legal to not being legal. And, there's nothing to do in this small town. I mean, it was a Walmart and like a bunch of fast food restaurants and and a couple bars and strip clubs. And I was just like, what do I do with myself?

And, this girl broke up with me, in the midst of this. And I was like, wow, I'm. I really need a hobby to keep myself busy. Otherwise I'm gonna go crazy. And so I was like, looking around and looking up at the stars and, like, the stars are pretty. Let's, try to learn how to take pictures of the stars.

And so I went to Walmart, bought a camera, and that's where the journey started. Oh, wow. So thank you Walmart. Yeah. Thank you Walmart. I mean, the camera I bought at Walmart wasn't good enough. So I, you know, went in, but, you know, an expensive camera couldn't capture pictures of stars. I went back, returned it, bought the most expensive camera there.

It wasn't good enough at the drive to the next city over, to find the camera store in Reno. And that's where it all started. So, I mean, it was like a it was a really, like, messy beginning. But I was so desperate to find a hobby that it turned out to be perfect. Yeah, that certainly did.

And you have still have quite an amazing career with photography and video, right? Yeah. I mean, photography is I mean, I still take photos. I just think that the, you know, we we take photographs to immortalize the project and we make videos to tell the story of how the project came to life and all the communities I got involved and why we did it, and what the nuances were.

But the product, I guess today that is being sold and transacted is more of like the monument, the art installation, rather than just the photograph. And that was sort of a conscious choice I made somewhat earlier on. I'm not entirely sure if it's like the full right decision, but, you know, photography I think, has undergone like a massive amount of devaluation over the last like 20, 30 years.

Especially because of the advent of digital, photography just became so much more accessible to everyone, including myself. I mean, I, I'm a digital baby. And then with the rise of Instagram and all of these different platforms that allow this kind of, content to be consumed super rapidly, I think there's just been this, dilution of value.

And so nowadays, the power of a photograph is I feel like it has really disappeared. And now you're throwing in AI, you're throwing in all these different mediums of visual creation, and you're competing in a very, very saturated space. And so my idea was actually to run the opposite direction and go like, where is it hard. Like what?

What are people not doing? And how can I do that in a way? That is hopefully, very useful to, to, to, to the climate movement. And so that's sort of how I landed in this sort of physical spaces. That's interesting. So but how did you become essentially an activist, an activist, an artist activist, like, how did the transition from photography to activism to photography in activism happen?

Completely by mistake. I you know, I mean, my whole life feels like when one big, random series of mistakes where I tripped and fell into what I, I currently I'm doing. But long story short, I, you know, I was doing I had, like, built up from 10,000 followers on social media when I first quit my job to 350,000 followers over the course of two years.

And this is before algorithms were a thing. And so this meant that I was actually reaching the people that I was. That I was creating for and along that journey of becoming an influencer and gaining a lot more power or a louder voice, if you will. I started to realize that, like, there was a certain amount of responsibility that came with that and that the projects that I was most proud of were always the ones in which I was contributing to a greater cause, something more meaningful.

And and in 2015, I got like the biggest career, the biggest job of my entire career where I was paid more in this one project than my entire career combined at the time. Oh, wow. And I was like, oh, I've made it. I've made it as a commercial photographer. This is great. And I think most people would stay there and celebrate it and double down on it.

I had that sort of opposite reaction where I was like, oh, this is great, but I'm not sure this is what I really want to be doing with my life. Just earning lots of money, selling products, building more followers like it just felt kind of empty and pointless. And I decided to take a one year sabbatical to just figure out how to add impact into my work.

Like I just started saying, I said no to every single commercial project that didn't have a social impact angle to it. Oh, wow. And that one year turned into a year and a half, before I got my first job. And, and that's where I stumbled across environmental issues. It wasn't so much that I wanted to tackle environmental issues.

It's just that I started watching documentaries, trying to think about what causes I could support with the work that I was doing. And I think environmental issues are easier to translate into art because it does not require like

so, like, the environment doesn't really have a voice of its own, but other, like, human causes have a lot of voices. And so let's say I wanted to stand up for, mental health issues, but if I'm not personally affected by it, then who am I to speak of it? Right? For the environment is something that we all benefit from and doesn't have any like specific ownership of.

And so it just lent itself a lot better to the kind of fantastical and surreal work that I was doing. And so I started just doing a bunch of these projects. They started becoming successful. Then I started learning more about it with each and every project that I did, and I kind of just fell into being an environmentalist, and I, and I really didn't want to be an environmentalist.

It's actually really inconvenient to be an environmentalist, because I feel guilty about everything. That's right. But anyways, long story short, that's how it that's that's how it started. Wow. That that it's it's so fascinating. So, I hope you don't mind me asking this, but do you now earn a living by being an environmentalist? Essentially. I mean, I haven't stopped since 2016.

That's in 2016. I didn't do I. I just decided that I was only going to do mission driven projects, or projects that were like on the road to becoming mission driven, like, yeah, in the sense that, like, I was learning or growing from it. And, yeah, I haven't I've never had to go back from that.

That's amazing. That's really amazing because I think a lot of, environmentalists struggle because they, you know, it's. It's it's sort of like

on the edges of society, being an environmentalist, being an activist, so many people just look down on it. And sometimes. So I think what you're doing is just incredible. And to be able to support yourself by doing that is an amazing achievement.

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm really lucky because, like, we don't live in a world like to be like a true environmentalist or true to to like, it's like it's so hard to exist in a structure that is extractive by nature. Right? Like, we live in a capitalist society that that profits from extracting resources from either people or planet and converting those into goods and services.

And so, like there are no like existing models that are truly regenerative. I think that we're we're just barely scratching the surface of what those look like. And, and it's never going to be the big corporations that are doing it that way. And so the where the money is, available and where the impact is or like generally in two very different places.

And so I think you need to figure out how to bridge those two worlds as an artist and to like, get the funds from the places that have it and then redirect it to the places that need it. Yeah. And somehow in the middle of that, stay true to what you can believe in, what you care about and and what the world needs all at the same time, and to be able to communicate it out into the world and, and do things.

And so it's this really delicate dance. And, I feel like I've been really lucky to be able to somehow trip and fall and figure it out. Yeah. But it's still definitely not like it's not easy. I mean, I, you know, I, I definitely think that one of the big challenges that I feel is like, where do I belong?

Like, where are the conferences for the people like me that do this kind of work? Where do we go to find funding? Where do we go to, to find support and inspiration and ideas and community. It's like there isn't really a category for this kind of stuff. And I it feels that way. I feel like this more and more is happening.

So eventually there will be. But yeah, at the moment it's, it's a hard place to be in. But you dance it so well, yeah. Like I said, I think I've gotten lucky. I was able to build a brand and a name for myself in a time where, photography was not particularly competitive. It was like a rising market

Yeah, I think I was able to ride the wave of Facebook Facebook videos when they were first coming out and the generation of clickbait to get a lot of media coverage. I think it was able to like, pivot into the experiential world in a time where, like, not many people were doing waste based art installations, now there's a whole lot of people.

But when I first started out, not a lot of people were doing it. And so I managed to carve out a name for myself, just barely. All right. Now I'm sort of like entering the sort of policy space, like doing work at the United Nations and so forth, in a time where there is not a lot of art there.

And so I am trying to always be right at the tip of where I can possibly place myself, where I think the work will be meaningful and useful, but where there's also not a lot of competition. And so I'm constantly trying to create new markets and opportunities for myself. And I can't say that I really know what I'm doing, but, you know, every year that goes on, I kind of, I kind of carve through and I'm like, oh, shit.

Okay. Yeah. And so I used to have a lot of scarcity around that. Like, used to always believe, like, I don't know when the rug is going to be pulled under me. I don't know if this is the year where, you know, my entire career is not going to make sense anymore. But now that I've been doing this for almost 15 years, I started in 2008 where like 2025 now, I feel like there's a part of me that has been able to, like, rewrite the story and say like, no matter what's going to happen, like, I'll figure it out.

Like, maybe not immediately, maybe not first year, second year, but like to have faith in the process and the journey that like, I'm out there, I'm constantly learning. I'm constantly experimenting. I seem to be able to adapt quickly enough to different things. Just barely quickly enough, that I should at least bet on myself to be able to believe that.

Like, no, no, it'll be okay, it'll be okay. And I think that's like a big piece of the puzzle is like, how do you stay mentally inspired, in the face of adversity in the face of, like, you know, a rapidly changing world? I absolutely agree with you mindset. Having just the right kind of mindset for the work that you do is.

Is imperative. You can't do it without it. Yeah. And it's sometimes very hard to find that mindset. I feel for myself sometimes. On some days I have that mindset. I know I'm doing the right thing. This is, you know, things are going to be okay at other days. You know, I'm down in the dumps and I'm going, what the heck am I doing?

What am I doing? How did I guess I'll go through that though. So yeah, it's normal. It is. It is normal. So I'd love to, ask you a few questions about your installations. I mean, sure, you spearhead all these huge groups of people, mostly volunteers, to help you create these amazing installations. I'd love to know more about it.

I think I'm really interested if I could ask you about a specific. Or you can answer in general, however you'd like to, but I was watching videos on your website. Thank you very much for all those videos. Plastic phobia. How did that come about? Okay. Plastic phobia. Plastic phobia was created in Singapore. It was an art installation that we created out of 18,000 plastic cups.

In collaboration with the Canadian High Commission. How it came about was that the Government of Canada wanted me to do an art exhibition. And they wanted they only had budget to print out some of my old photos, and put them on display. And I asked them if they could provide us with a room if we were able to raise outside funding to create a physical art piece, because this was right at the point in time where I was trying to prove that I could transition from photography into art installations.

And they offered us a free space, my friend Laura. So I went out and got some money from a bank, and we basically put 100% of that money into building this art piece to the best of our ability. And where was this team in Singapore? Oh, so, wait, so the Canadian government want you to do an installation in Singapore?

Yes. So Canada has a cultural export program. I think the US also has one where they support the creation of artist arts and the celebration of artists that, speak to the values of Canada. And what does Canada value like diversity, inclusion values like indigenous rights and values, environmental rights and so forth. So in some ways, it's Canada's greenwashing arm, if you want to think of it that way or in another.

It's just like, what are the values that a country like Canada holds? True? And they sometimes have a little bit of budget to allocate towards artists in foreign countries so that they can, you know, draw attention to these yes issues. Yeah. And so, when we started creating this, I think we were just thinking about like, what materials would be interesting.

And it just so happens that, Singapore has a lot of hawker centers. Hawker centers are essentially like food courts that are just distributed across the entire country. And you that's where you go to get food. And there's just everything is single use plastics there. And and at the time I hadn't done anything with plastic cups yet. And so we just reached out to a local government organization there and asked them if they could support us.

I mean, anyways, we ended up collecting 18,000 plastic cups within a single like a day and a half. Wow. I'm just going around and then needing to count them, clean them, organize them. And that's where we were like, okay, we need some help who will show up? And so through social media, through the local partners, we just asked if anyone would show up and I think we had like a couple dozen people come and help out, just, to clean all these plastic cups over the course of a couple days.

And, Joshua Goh, who was our fabricator, our builder, who designed this entire physical piece, gave us his workshop space. And so there's some people that were paid. There are other people that were volunteers, and together we we, you know, ended up building this thing. And I think, like each and every project that I do generally tends to be an opportunity to engage community.

And I think that when we watch the creation of a project like this and we see how many ordinary people are coming together, using their unique skills to contribute their little part into the project, that's where you get like a feeling of hope and possibility. You sort of have this lens into what it takes to make the world better.

And it isn't just one person coming up with everything, but rather an entire collection of humans coming together, contributing their own little unique piece of that puzzle. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's really that's really an example of one. And I think over time, my projects have gotten more complex, more interconnected with different causes and organizations.

But the the fundamental approach is, is basically the same. Yeah. I think that's what I love most about your installations. Not only are they really large and impactful, but you also involve so much of the community in creating it. It's just yeah, it's so fascinating to me. And beautiful, I mean, one of the other interesting things is like people always say like, oh, like, because these art installations aren't cheap, right?

They cost tens of thousands. And now nowadays they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I'm like, wow. And so it's like, okay, well, it's a lot of money to pour into it. But like, where does that money go? That money invariably goes back to supporting local communities, local builders, local fabricators. It's like goes back into the local economy to bring something like this alive, because it's not it's not not much of it is being kept like these art installations generally are really bad money making things.

So yeah, they're not property owners. So then you get funds from whatever entity is willing to fund it, and then you build each installation locally. So the people who are doing most of the fabricating is, is who gets paid for it. Essentially then and then there's materials. There's there's I mean, it's a lot of food and accommodations.

Oh, yes. I think basic and basic transportation, like a bunch of stuff. Right? Yeah, yeah. That's, you probably need a financial person to help you keep track of it all. Yeah, I wish, I wish, I mean, my God helped me to do a little bit of the accounting stuff. Oh. That's good. One of the ways that my parents stay involved in the work that we do.

Oh, I love that. Could you tell me about your, mermaid project? I mean, that is just so gorgeous. Yeah. That was, my third environmental project ever. Basically, my I was coming home to Montreal for my sister's wedding, and at the time, my mom discovered a mermaid tail designer on Facebook and just sent me a link, and she's like, hey, I thought you would find this interesting.

And I was like, oh, super fun. How can I work with this person? Because I want and I wanted to do something meaningful. So I was like, okay, well, mermaids live in the ocean. What issues affect the oceans? Oh, the great Pacific garbage patch just got discovered. Maybe there's a way of connecting these two worlds. So then I started exploring, what it would take to collect a bunch of plastic bottles.

And in my mind, 10,000 seemed like a good number. I was talking with some friends about it. De, my friend who is, you know, wanted to do some production creative stuff, and he was like, oh, let me help you find these bottles. And he ended up just cold calling a couple recycling centers. And one of them answered, Tom RA and they said, all right, cool.

We'll give you 10,000 plastic bottles. Where do you want us to drop them off? It's like a 18ft truck. And I was like, oh, crap, I was just going to do this in my garage, but I think I needed something bigger. I ended up reaching out to, a person whose wedding I shot a couple years back, and asked them if they had access to a warehouse.

And he's like a flooring company. And so they had, like, a space that they could lend us. Oh, wow. At a free space. And now in 10,000 plastic bottles, my sister just got married. So then I had a wedding party in town to help me clean these bottles. I said, over the course of a week, we just cleaned, organized, labeled all these plastic bottles.

I found another friend of mine, Jim, who helped me rig a camera using, plywood and police to, like, suspend a camera directly overhead for to create this ocean of of plastics. I had found a bunch of equipment, to tether my my phone or an iPad to my camera so that I could see the scene from the ground level.

And, yeah, we just pulled this project off in the course of a week and, the video that we ended up document, like creating and documenting, ended up getting 36 million views on on Facebook. That's amazing. About three months later and I was like, wow, there's something really here. So would you say that perhaps, maybe that one was really what launched you into these?

Yeah. I mean, I think the Mermaid project was the first time that I had actually founded a repeatable model. You know, like, prior to that, I had gone storm chasing to raise awareness for climate change, using storms as a metaphor for climate change with, like, these big brewing supercells. I also, tied a model underwater with some sharks running around for shark conservation.

Oh, wow. And then, and then this was the third one. But, like, you can't put storms as a background for everything, or you can't keep tying thing people down with sharks swimming around for other causes. And so but this one, when it came to like overconsumption and the topic of overconsumption, you just use a lot of little recognizable things to create something big.

Yeah. Became the, the default sort of pattern I followed for then a whole bunch of projects, even till today. And right now I actually have the opposite problem. It's like, how do I get out of just doing that? Like, you know, it's it's gotten a little bit annoying and boring to constantly play with waste.

And so right now, I'm in the process of actually trying to do more creative things outside of that. Oh, interesting. So was your project for was at Cop26 that you just did in was it Columbia? Yeah. So that was a UN biodiversity conference. It was Cop 16 specifically for the, the CBD. I mean, there the cops are really confusing because they have they all have similar names.

Right. So Cop 29 just happened for the climate conference, but then you're like, wait, why? Why are we going from Cop 29 to Cop 16? Well, Cop stands for conference of the parties. And so every single time a conference is held around climate, it goes up one number. This one is a conference on biodiversity, but it's also called a cop.

And so we just have lots of different cops for different things. But we all use the same nomenclature. So it's super confusing. Yes. Thank you for explaining that. I had no idea. Yeah. But yeah, the last the last project that I did was, a two and a half storyteller Jenga tower, a Jenga art installation where each and every block represents a different ecosystem.

We had 13 different ecosystems represented across 33 different blocks, and it's 20 stories, like 20 level tall art installation. And, you know, from the bottom we had corals, seagrass, kelp forest. And then we go up and we get to the wetlands with mangroves, oyster lagoons and in lakes. And then you kind of go up and up and through like deserts and mountains until you eventually arrive at the rainforest.

And we represented this in this giant tower. And then on top of that, we put three children sculptures of three children so that we could actually show how we are dependent on nature, on a stable biodiversity. And on the bottom of this art installation, we had a bunch of blocks that had been pulled out, and these blocks represented different, the different ways that ecosystems have been destroyed.

So leading causes of biodiversity loss from deforestation to, monoculture to is, to plastic pollution, chemical pollution and so forth. And so we had all these different representations. And this was something that was like in the heart of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference. 24,000 delegates from 186 countries would walk by this thing every single day. That's amazing.

And yeah, and I think for me, that just felt like, a cool place to be able to contribute art into. And it takes, it takes you away from using multiple plastic bottles to. Exactly. And that was like the hope was like to move into another space, you know. Right. And what were those, Jenga boxes made from, if you don't mind.

Steel. Oh. Oh, wow. So it was just metal. Metal boxes stacked and welded one on top of another. And the ecosystems themselves were just, we had some that were living plants and some that were not. Oh, okay. Yeah. And what happened to the sculpture once the conference was done, we donated it to the Botanical Gardens of Cali.

Oh, yeah. Oh, they're hosting the I mean, we didn't sell it to them. We just kind of lent it to them on a permanent loan. Hopefully some rich person comes one day and wants to slap their name on it and make some money, but for now, I mean, we just we just thought that this was the best way of making sure that its legacy could continue, that it was a publicly accessible piece that anyone could go and see and enjoy and appreciate.

Yeah. Oh, I love that. It lives on. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really hard. Like, it's surprisingly difficult to find, like places that have space to host and maintain something. Yeah. Like, it's always a challenge. Yeah. And it's expensive. It's so expensive to to move these. Right. Well, especially still so heavy, I suppose plastic bottles are a little less expensive to move because they're lighter.

They're lighter, but still a lot of logistics involved. Yeah, all this stuff just has so many logistics. So I, I know that one of the I think probably one of the most publicized pieces that you've made was the plastic tap. So great to bring you back to plastic bottles. Yeah. Where was what what was that made for in the the first iteration of it?

So the giant plastic tap it and created like, so many times at this point. But the first one was once again commissioned by the Kenyan government. Oh. The first, first, first version was, supposed to be, for gallery in in Paris. Like Canada has an art gallery in Paris. And they were looking to, create a piece with me.

And unfortunately, the time frame that they wanted to commissioned, this was right as Covid was, was happening. And so the, the entire country basically shut down. And my trip to France was not possible. And then playing with trash in a time where there was a pandemic going around, had a bunch of security issues. Anyways, long story short, we just ended up.

I ended up convincing them to let me build the art installation in Montreal, and then shipping it to France on time. And so what we ended up doing was collecting all these different kinds of plastic. So it wasn't just bottles, it was a variety of different plastics, single use plastics of all types. We led a one month collection.

Oh. Wow. In Montreal, where we just tried to collect as much plastics as possible from the community, from people, and then over the course of the next month, clean them, organize them, tied them together using strings that we made from two liter plastic bottles. Oh, wow. And, and then in parallel, the core of the faucet was being built by a local fabrication shop out of, upcycled metal that we, scavenged from, a building that was about to be demolished.

Oh. That's amazing. Wow. And. Yeah, and we found a way of, like, mounting this giant faucet onto a manual forklift so that you could raise it almost, three storeys high. And then by attaching these plastic bottles, you could actually hide the base, of it and covered it the entire thing in plastics. And it gave us the opportunity to build, like, a fully mobile art installation that's so that.

Yeah, so that that that faucet, we ended up moving to five different places in Montreal, including a, a, a shipping, like a place filled with shipping containers, a beach, a recycling center. The same people that landed us the, bottles for the mermaids ended up loaning us their facilities for a weekend. Oh, cool. And, and we went even.

In fact, we even found a landfill. So we were trying to, like, highlight different aspects of the past plastic pollution crisis. And so the exhibition that they ended up doing was a combination of the physical art piece and the video of how we did it and all the different locations, that we went to in order to pull this project off.

And that was the first time. And then the second version was actually, a bunch like some other artist. Collective wanted to exhibit the, this concept at Art Basel. But I couldn't make it. So they just created a version of the faucet on their own for their events. Which was super cool feeling to, like, see the art emerge without me having to be directly involved.

It's sort of like how a symbol grows. And anyways, the third version of this ended up being, at the United Nations Environmental Assembly, where the Global Plastics Treaty Resolution was about to be signed, and for this one, I mean, these are all like everyone. It's such a long story, but it's okay. We have to tell me it wasn't.

No, but yeah, but this version was, basically my friend, Dave Ford from the Ocean Plastic Leadership Network thought it would be really interesting to try to bring this art installation there. He managed to hook me up with some crypto funders who are interested in pouring money into this, even though we didn't yet have permission. So we ended up using the money to build the art installation before we had permission from the United Nations.

And so we got we got permission at, to build this Friday night at 5 p.m. for an 8 a.m. install on Sunday. Oh my gosh. And so it was super last minute. We just barely got it in time. We got we collected three tons of plastics from the slums of Canberra, which were just a couple miles away from where the United Nations headquarters were in there with their pristine green lawns.

Oh, wow. We hired, like over, 80 ladies. Who helped this, cleaned and tie them all together, dragged all of that up to the United Nations, made a four story tall version of the faucet, and this time, you know, these 1500 delegates from 193 countries were walking by this thing each and every day, to to discuss whether or not a global plastic treaty was, was important for us to turn off the plastic tap in.

And that one, I think, ended up, you know, at the time, I didn't realize how significant it was. But, you know, it ended up being adopted by the United Nations on their global plastics report. And I think anyone who works in plastics in policy has seen this art installation and knows about it. And and it's continued to grow.

And so since then, more faucets have been created at UN Ocean Week in Lisbon. I, I have a free version, a cardboard version that anyone can download and make on their own. Is that the version that you have for kids had a. Yeah, it's a cardboard plastic tap. It's created hundreds of different, by hundreds of different students and, all around the world.

It's been absolutely phenomenal to me. I love that. So is it like a, templates that you glue together for? Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. I'll send it to you so that. Oh. Thank you. Yeah. You know anyone that wants to use it, you're more than welcome to, Take it. Adapt it, leverage it. Oh. Thank you.

It might be me. There you go. Yeah. It's, it's pretty easy. It takes, like, a day. I'm not even, like, half a day to make the faucet and then just gotta make the faucet collect the plastic. I mean, gathering the materials and making sure you have plastics and everything might take a little bit more time, but the actual build itself, as with most things like the prep, is where all the work exactly.

That is so true. Now that's amazing and I love that you made it a project for it that kids are able to do on their own. Yeah, I mean, I think this has been the the dance, right? Like you want you want to keep things exclusive so that you can actually make money off of it, but then you want to make it as, accessible as possible so that it can grow into becoming like an accessible symbol for everyone.

And so, yeah, it's it's a dance. It's a dance for sure. Yeah. But I think, I think you're absolutely right in making it accessible for kids because, you know, they are our future, however cliche that statement is. They are. And, it's they need to know what's happening and. Yeah. Do. Yeah. So. Wow. That's amazing.

gosh, I have I wrote down a several installations that I want to ask you about, and I'm thinking, how much time do we have?

What should I ask about? Why is there one specific that is your current favorite that you might want to tell me about? My current favorite. I mean, I think, I think maybe since we've talked so much about plastics and overconsumption, it'd be cool to talk about the bio char. Phoenix. Oh, yes, I created my list.

Please tell me. Yeah. So one of the, you know, as I've tried hard to not be the trash boy, one of the cool technologies that I discovered and stumbled across was this thing called biochar. Biochar is basically like a form of charcoal, a form of carbon. But you basically take organic material and convert it through a process called pyrolysis from like, something organic into just like pure hard carbon.

And so, an analogy might be if you take toast and you put it in the oven for a long time, it's in a low oxygen environment, there's no oxygen circulating, so it's not catching on fire. But if you leave it for too long, it'll turn black. That black stuff at the end is basically more or less carbon that's left over.

And you can take this carbon, you can crumble it, you can put it in the soil, and it acts as this wonderful soil amendment to rehabilitate the soil. It can it's like it's very porous. So it's really great for, holding moisture and microorganisms and all these other things. And so it's, it's a way to not only heal the soil, but also to store carbon.

So it's like a net positive in so many ways. And so biochar, is originally an indigenous technology. Like we we hypothesized that it came out of like the Amazon, like the Amazon rainforest and like the Incas and the Mayans and and that they were doing this naturally, allowing organic waste to smolder. And they have this, this sort of really fertile soil called terra preta in a place that traditionally has very little topsoil.

And so and they're all next to civilizations, like where the cities used to be. And so, and so this rediscovery of this has been really interesting. And it's such a popular way of sequestering carbon. It's so easy to verify, it's so easy to do that. 89% of verified carbon removal credits is biochar based. Oh, wow. And yet so few people know of it.

And so I thought, this is cool. Let's try to find a way of like, building some art out of it. No one's really done anything large and vertical. And so we ended up creating, a six meter tall phoenix. And where was it using? Four tons of carbon, which is a carbon footprint of the average person produced every single year.

Oh, wow. And so it acts not only as, like a visual representation of what you like when we say, like, we're putting carbon into the atmosphere, what does that look like? What does that feel like here? You have like a physical representation of it and you can see how much we actually produce. And so anyways, I built this in, in Thailand, because that's where I found, a person, commonly from Wong Pi.

They both they had both a bamboo farm and knew about biochar. And they were really excited to partner in on this whole thing and so and work on it together. You know, it's it's that Phoenix is absolutely stunning. Definitely. Thank you. So what are you working on in 2025? 2025? I mean, the thing is, are you 26 already?

I don't know. Oh, no, I, I am just never in control over what projects happen next. You know, I, I can I can want something, but that doesn't mean that it'll actually happen because, every project depends on a do I get access? So if I want to do something at the United Nations, I can't just roll in and build it.

I need to get permission. Right. And so first I need to get permission. Second, I need to raise enough money. Third, I need to be capable of building a team with the amount of money that I raise. And then fourth, I need to actually build the piece. Right. So these four things need to happen. And very often they don't add.

So either I'm going to successfully pull it off or not. And so in this moment, I'm attempting to build one at the United Nations Ocean Conference. That's where they're hoping the High Seas Treaty will get ratified. If it doesn't get there in time, then this installation will hopefully, give countries that have signed the treaty opportunities to pressure the countries that haven't yet, give activist groups an opportunity to call them out.

And if they do sign it in time, then it'll act as hopefully a symbol of, like, all the work that lies ahead. And so I think of it as a useful, a useful tool to, to communicate. And what I'm hoping to create for that one is a giant sculpture of the earth, where instead of the oceans, we have fishing nets.

And inside of this fishing nets, we can tangle a bunch of different issues that are affecting the oceans from bycatch, coral bleaching, plastics. And just, you know, how people visualize what that looks like. Oh, I love that. So what would the continents be made from? Yet to be determined? I mean, I think it sort of depends on how big we build it.

So if we're building it super large, it would make sense to just build the whole thing out of metal. If it isn't, then we'll have to figure it out. We, you know, we we were thinking that, like, if we could find a proper waste stream that could also be, like, we could do it out of out of plastics.

I was just talking to this guy yesterday who came to my house, and he, has invented this thing he's calling plastic create. So it's like plastic concrete that is created by heating up sand and fuzing it with, thin sheets of plastics, like paper bags, and or plastic bags and, it does it without heating it so much that it off gases.

So it's, it's just enough to fuze it together to create this like really densely layered, textured surface that is actually pretty solid without, making it to impossible. So. Oh, I don't know if that could be a possibility. I'm not. I'm kind of not there yet. I'm at that. I'm at the phase of trying to get permission to to build this thing.

Gotcha. Wow. Well, good luck with that. That sounds amazing. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I mean, this year, right now I have like nothing confirmed. There is like, everything's a question at the stage. And that's kind of what it means to move, move through my life. I actually make most of my money, in consulting and speaking engagements.

Oh, that's one, because that's where you have the margins. So consulting would be a company comes up and they're like, oh, man, you do great work. I would love to pick your brain on like, what you might create to communicate this complex issue. And, I invite them into a multi-month consulting period where we brainstorm and think an idea together.

And I operate on a retainer basis, and that's how I'm able to make money, like profit. Right. And speaking engagements, where I speak for corporations and, you know, I just spoke to Boston consulting groups and their leadership summit, and, and so I'd basically take these sort of environmental, social and governance principles. And I talk about them in a really creative, inspiring way.

Yeah. You're an excellent speaker. I have seen some of yeah, it was too. Yeah, yeah. No, no. Yeah. Do you, do you have a Ted talk? I have three Ted talks. I don't have a single Ted mainstage talk. Okay. Yes. You know, these these things will happen when they happen. If they happen. I used to be really, obsessed.

I'm trying to get that sort of validation. And I think these days I've just kind of given up. I'm like, it'll happen when it'll happen. If it'll happen, I just heads down, do the work that really matters and go from there. Yeah, I think that's a good way to be. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Benjamin.

This has been so fascinating and insightful. Thank you. Oh, thanks for having me on your show. Oh, yeah. Let's. This is a little project of love for me, so we'll see where it goes. But, hey, season two. So that's how that's how it begins. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Wow, such a fascinating conversation. Benjamin is doing amazing things and I cannot wait to see what the future will bring. What will he focus on next? Thank you for being here for it all, and I'll see you next time.

This podcast was created, produced and edited by me, Natalya Khorover. Theme music by RC Guida. To find out more about me, go to art by natalya.com to find out about my community. Go to Repurposer collective.com and to learn with me. Check out all my offerings at Eco Loop, Dot Art. Thank you for listening.