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The latest piece of artwork by underground guerrilla artist Banksy on Dec. 20 in Port Talbot, Wales. Matt Cardy / Getty Images
Secretive graffiti artist Banksy has created another thought-provoking piece of art.
His latest pop-up went on a concrete block garage in Port Talbot, Wales that appears to show a child catching snowflakes with their mouth. But once you look around the corner, you realize that the child's mouth is open to ash emanating from a dumpster fire.
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<span></span>The British guerrilla artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BrkqwhnlNjR/" target="_blank">confirmed</a> on his verified Instagram this week that the artwork was his. The haunting video post, accompanied by a children's Christmas song, first displays the mural itself. It then zooms out to reveal a grey industrial landscape and the Port Talbot steelworks plant looming in the background.
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The caption along with the post reads, "Season's greetings."
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</p><div id="840a4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="JPC3AR1576683777"><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="4" style=" background:#FFF; border:0;
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BrkqwhnlNjR/" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif;
font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;
word-wrap:break-word;" target="_top">Banksy on Instagram: “.
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Season’s greetings
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.”</a></p>
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Port Talbot resident and former steelworker Gary Owen, 55, claimed to <a href="https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/former-steelworker-who-says-asked-15576292" target="_blank">Wales Online</a> that Banksy's piece was in response to an Instagram message he sent. Owen said he asked Banksy to create art that would highlight Port Talbot's dust problem.
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"Can you do some art in Port Talbot, the steelworks is making lots of dust every day and the locals are sick of it," Owen texted the artist in August.
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Although his text never received a reply, Owen does not think it's a coincidence that the display popped up in his town four months later.
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Owen also claimed to the publication that he believes the area's children are facing health risks by playing in dust coming from the steel plant.
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Earlier this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) listed Port Talbot as the most polluted place in the UK. However, in May, the WHO revised the list and issued corrected figures, according to the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43964341" target="_blank">BBC</a>. Port Talbot is still identified as one of 17 areas in the UK that has met the fine-particle <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/air-pollution">air pollution</a> limit of 10 micrograms per cubic meter set by the WHO.
</p><p>Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution as they have faster respiratory rates than adults, so they breathe in more pollutants. <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/29-10-2018-more-than-90-of-the-world%E2%80%99s-children-breathe-toxic-air-every-day" target="_blank">Around 93 percent</a> of the world's children under the age of 15 years (1.8 billion children) breathe toxic air every day, according to the WHO, which also estimated that in 2016, 600,000 children died from acute lower respiratory infections caused by polluted air.</p><p><span></span>Banksy's art has featured environmental messages before. For instance, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/market/detroit-banksy-a-bust-at-auction-336592" target="_blank">this 2010 piece</a> in the ruins of Detroit's Packard Automotive Plant shows a child with a can of red paint and the words, "I remember when all this was trees."
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In 2009, the street artist spray-painted the words "I DON'T BELIEVE IN GLOBAL WARMING" on a wall beside a canal in London. His message came after the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen that was widely considered a failure for not producing a binding agreement to tackle climate change, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/dec/21/banksy-copenhagen-regents-canal" target="_blank">The Guardian</a> reported then.
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Japatino / Getty Images
Local governments in England and Wales have said that only about a third of the plastic food containers recycled by their constituents are actually able to be processed in recycling facilities, BBC News reported Saturday.
<p>The Local Government Association (LGA) found that 525,000 metric tons (approximately 578,713 U.S. tons) of plastic pots, trays and tubs are used by English and Welsh households, but only 169,000 metric tons (approximately 186,291 U.S. tons) can actually be recycled. The rest end up in landfills. </p><p>The rejected plastics are usually low-grade mashups of polymers or black plastics that cannot be scanned by recycling machines because of their color. </p><p>"It's time for manufacturers to stop letting a smorgasboard of unrecyclable and damaging plastic flow into our environment. We've been calling for producers of unrecyclable material to develop a plan to stop this from entering the environment for years," LGA environment spokesperson Judith Blake told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/04/only-a-third-of-plastic-food-packaging-can-be-recycled-councils-say" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>. </p><p>The LGA proposed five fixes that would reduce the number of unrecyclable plastic food containers, according to The Guardian.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">1. Make yogurt containers with the same material as plastic water bottles, instead of a hard-to-recycle mix of polypropylene and polystyrene.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><span></span>2. Also make margarine and ice cream tubs from the same plastic as water bottles, instead of polypropylene.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><span></span>3. Make fruit and vegetable baskets from fewer, more easily recyclable materials instead of a mix of polymers.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><span></span>4. Make bakery trays from more easily recyclable materials, instead of a mix of polymers.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><span></span>5. Change the color of black plastic packaging for microwave goods so that it can be scanned and recycled more easily.</p><p>The use of black plastic is especially ridiculous because it is only used for aesthetic reasons, LGA councillor Peter Fleming told BBC News.</p><p>"It's almost criminal to think that some of the plastics being used are difficult to recycle, and black plastic is almost impossible to recycle," Fleming said.</p><p>Blake also suggested that the government consider banning single-use, low grade plastics.</p><p>The UK grocery industry is in the process of trying to make a change. More than 40 companies signed the "<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/plastics-pact-companies-uk-2563573289.html" target="_self">UK Plastics Pact</a>" in April, promising, among other things, to make sure all packaging was reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.</p><p>The plastics industry says that a much as 80 percent of existing packaging could be made more recyclable, BBC News reported.</p><p>Globally, a 2017 study found that only 9 percent of all plastic waste has been recycled, with 79 percent ending up in landfills or the environment, <a href="https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/" target="_blank">National Geographic reported</a>. </p><p>The same study found that 8.3 billion metric tons (approximately 9.2 billion U.S. tons) of plastic have been generated in just six decades.</p>"This kind of increase would 'break' any system that was not prepared for it, and this is why we have seen leakage from global waste systems into the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/oceans" target="_self">oceans</a>," University of Georgia environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck told National Geographic.
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