stoff♻wert

stoff♻wert (2022) is a collaboration with Jakob Wirth, facilitated by Hannes Brunner.

At the stoff♻wert market stand, customers can receive plastic trash for a negative price, in order to give this material, originally illegally dumped in Brandenburg, a second chance to get to the recycling bin, and thus rejoin the garbage economy.
Upon receiving branded bags filled with compressed plastic, customers committed by contract to correctly dispose of the material in a "yellow bin" designated for recycling.

The money received by customers together with the trash, 0,94€/plastic, corresponds to the average price for a recycling license paid by plastic producers in the German recycling system.

This value, meant to finance recycling costs and impose costs on plastic production, is normally passed down to the final customer.
In this way, customers at stoff♻wert received back the recycling money that customers had paid in the past– but that never fulfilled its role.

The work closes a cycle of value that would potentially stop as precious plastic lands in the landfill. The term "Wertstoff," now used in German for recyclable plastic and metal, is meant to draw attention to their value as a resource and new raw material. The piece comments on the little-know, largely untransparent economy of waste management that involves plastic producers, the state, consumers, transport and recycling companies in a series of value transfers that too often leads to total depreciation– not only of the material’s value, but of the chance to improve the human relationship to the earth.