by K. Briar Somerville

Look out for the bottle panther!  A group of four Pitt students interested in promoting sustainability awareness have teamed up with Plant-to-Plate to erect a new panther sculpture made of recyclable bottles on Pitt’s campus.  Plant-to-Plate is a community garden and kitchen that gives Pitt students the opportunity to grow their own food, and soon their lot will also feature original, sustainable student art.

The Plant-to-Plate garden lot is located at Oakland Avenue and Sennott Street, and their season kick-off event will take place on May 8.  On April 12, the Sustainable Art team will set up a booth and discuss their work at the 6th Annual Student Sustainability Symposium, which will be held at the William Pitt Union from 9:00am to 3:00pm.  The two groups are working together to plan an unveiling event later in April or in May which will hopefully attract students to the garden as well as prompt frank, open dialogue about recycling on campus.

The mission of the Sustainable Art team at Pitt is to inspire recycling among students.  Crafted of a mass of plastic bottles that will be able to be taken apart and recycled when the panther begins to deteriorate, the sculpture will hopefully provoke consideration of the large numbers of bottles wasted by our culture en masse.  According to The Green Upgrader, the average American consumes 167 bottles of water per year, and 80% of plastic bottles are not recycled.

To donate your recyclable plastic bottles to the Sustainable Art Project, email <kbsomerville@gmail.com>.

K. Briar Somerville is an intern at the Thomas Merton Center and a transfer student at Pitt who quit an undergrad program in New York to Occupy Wall Street. Briar is also a kitty.