Design students Hong, Yi-Chen Guo, and Yi-Hui Cheng Yu-Ti from the National Taiwan University have collected water from various contaminated water sources in Taiwan to create frozen popsicles for their project Polluted Water Popsicles.
With Taiwan having experienced rapid industrialization, urbanization, and economic growth over the last 3 decades, the environment has simultaneously suffered deterioration. While various issues such as an inadequately connected and developed central sewer system, poor air quality, and increasing use of motor vehicles negatively impacting the local environment, one of the biggest environmental problems currently facing Taiwan are the pollutants created by the semiconductor, petrochemicals, steel, and petrochemical sectors. Lacking any substantial and enforced public national system for industrial waste disposal, pollutants are dumped into the local environment and water sources with impunity.
Visiting lakes, rivers, beaches and ports all throughout Taiwan to collect polluted water, the design students froze the polluted water inside of moulds then encased it with polyester resin for the purposes of preservation and display. Also designing and creating individual wrappers for their popsicles with each one labelled with the source of where they sampled the water, the design students have stated that the popsicles were made to bring awareness to water pollution in Taiwan.
The Polluted Water Popsicle project has been nominated for the Young Pin Design Award and was also featured in the New Generation of Design Exhibition at the Taipei World Trade Center.
To learn more about this project, click the link below.
