Fashion designer Camilo Morales has turned vinyl political advertisements for candidates in local, state, and federal elections in Mexico into bags.
Reuters reports on the project.
Over the past year, Morales has been removing the ubiquitous banners, cutting out fragments and sewing them into bags that he sells for between 100 pesos ($5.44) and 600 pesos ($32.63).
Morales' cheapest bags, sold under his label Rere, feature a white background in most advertisements. The most expensive is a collage depicting the heavily shadowed eyes of Clara Brugada, the ruling party's candidate to become the next mayor of Mexico City.
"I joked that they practically grew on trees. At night I shot one advertisement, and the next day another one was already hanging in its place," says Morales.
According to Juan Manuel Núñez, a professor at the Ibero-American University, in Mexico City alone this season, political advertising has generated about 10,000 tons of trash.
"Although these banners and tarps are advertised as environmentally friendly, they are usually made of PVC, which takes hundreds of years to decompose," he says.
Other attempts to find new uses for advertising included a TikTok user turning them into doghouses and migrants turning them into tents.
Earlier, EcoPolitic talked about the Ukrainian Valentyn Frechka, who became a finalist of the Prize for Young Inventors European Inventor Award 2024 for the development of technology for converting fallen leaves into environmentally friendly paper.
