Fishing for plastic

If you were to be wandering around the Botafogo Beach in Rio around now, don't be surprised to see two giant fish rearing out of the sand and seemingly aiming for the sky.Glittering with the reflection of the sun's rays or if it's a little later in the evening, glowing a warm blue and red (thanks to little LED lights), juxtaposed against the scenic backdrop of Rio's mountains, they might look like something your beauty-drunk brain made up on its own. But they're real, alright. Well, not real fish but real enough otherwise. 

Image by Ascom Riotur

Made out of plastic bottles, these gorgeous fish are not only a spectacular tourist attraction for the duration of the  United Nations Conference of Sustainable Development or the Rio +20. They are also intended to remind us, not least of all, thanks to their sheer size, of the threat of over-consumption of plastic bottles to the planet. Each day human beings around the world use millions of these disposable plastic bottles that are ironically, not disposed of correctly, ending up at land fills instead of being recycled. Unsurprisingly our rivers and oceans are also victims of this over-consumption, directly affecting the marine life which is choking under all this plastic. 

The giant sculptures are meant to impress people, in many ways, of the the threat plastic and our careless attitudes towards its use pose to the ecosystem, and more specifically to marine life. And the bottles used for this are barely an infinitesimal portion of the real problem facing us. 

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Pop a champagne and how!

So, Guinness is celebrating its 250th Anniversary this year and they've decided to make a splash with it. Quite literally.

The company commissioned London based Jump Studios to repurpose a submarine, creating the world's first deep sea bar! Working in co-ordination with famed carpenter and designer Nicholas Alexander, Jump Studios has created this funky bar in the insides of the submarine. Designed to look like it was floating full of bubbles the team measured the interiors of the submarine and constructed the pre-fabricated interior shell in Alexander's London studio before assembling it in sub zero temperatures and then sinking the newly created bar deep into the Baltic Sea. While some of these prefabricated bubbles have been fit with LED lights, some have been left open to hold glasses and the like.

 Made to strict marine engineering guidelines, the designers had to take into account not just the unique interiors of the submarine but also the stringent guidelines regarding its daily mechanics and ventilation and fire safety. However, none of that seems to have impaired the signature playfulness of the Jump studio that is now stamped  on the world's first and only deep sea bar. 

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