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15, October 2019 – Rotarian is turning trash into art
Vic Grosjean is collaborating with Artists to turn pollution into art.
‘Melbourne Rotarian’s turning the Yarra’s trash into art raising awareness on pollution’, 15 October 2019, by Samantha Surfield, Melbourne community initiative led by Vic Grosjean is collecting pollution along rivers and turning trash into art creating value for the community.
Melbourne Rotarian’s turning the Yarra’s trash into art raising awareness on pollution.
This is an amazing story about everyday people taking control of our cities pollution and not only doing something about it but also turning it into art that reminds us of the beauty of our environment and our need to preserve it.
Every month a group of Melbourne’s Rotarians meet at Flinders street station with volunteers to clean up the Yarra. The aim – removing plastics and other waste from our waterways, surrounding vegetation and paths supporting a cleaner city and a pollution free water way.
Run by Melbourne City Rotaract club the idea is that the community can participate in the clean-up, fellowship together and enjoy the environment as part of the walk, removing visible amounts of pollution on the way.
The Project Leader Vic Grosjean is Chartered Engineer with 13 years of Ocean experience, and the Principal Consultant at OceanX Group, an Engineering Consultancy specializing in Environmental Pollution Monitoring here in Melbourne. He is also one of the director of the Environmental Sustainability Rotarian Action Group (ESRAG). As a supporter of Rotary values, he was passionate about providing an innovative approach to clean water through his environmental project “The Ocean CleanX”. As a leader and community educator, Vic strives for projects to reduce water pollution on a global scale and will make a long-term difference for humanity. His career focus is to build collaboration between organizations in order to advance Engineering and preserve the Environment with the goal of Saving our Oceans and rivers.
When we asked Vic Grosjean what the main items found were he advised, “our last event has collected more than 1000 cigarette butts and over 1200 plastic items, we also recovered a bike”.
Turning Trash into art
What has been collected has been turned into a beautiful piece of art by the world renown artist Mocha Li who creates ocean graphics and eco-bags to raise awareness and protect our oceans. She ties the environment into her work; her oil paintings contain recycled or reused materials; she also knits plastic yarns from deconstructed plastic water bottles and creates photo-printed bags.
“The Ocean CleanX” project artwork is a mixed media contemporary modern masterpiece with colours inspired by the Great Barrier Reef. In society today; can you still appreciate how beautiful nature is? Underneath all the natural colours, the painting contains rubbish collected during the Yarra river clean-up event where Rotarians and Rotaractors worked together to clean this popular waterway. As humanity is approaching a critical time, the painting is a reminder that we need to recognise the beauty in nature if we want to keep and preserve it. Otherwise, rubbish may block us from seeing our colourful environment. We can still rescue our oceans now, but people need to be aware of the urgency to act. Let’s share the beautiful natural colours of our world and resist the temptation to use single use plastics before the problem completely block sour view. “Be grateful to see the rainbow of corals and crystal sea water. Let yourself fall in love with the natural beauty of nature”-Mocha Li (2019)
Turning art into community projects
The art was donated to the Rotary club of Flemington art show to raise funds for community programs including:
- One Girl-educating girls in Africa
- Rotary Overseas Recycled Playgrounds-sending playground equipment to Sri Lanka, East Timor and wherever there is a need.
- 1,000 Stories before school-providing picture story books for children from the disadvantaged local community and high-rise housing estates
- End Trachoma
- End Polio
In summary
This is an article that showed how one person in his 20’s saw how birds were dying from eating plastic and felt empowered to do something about it, his values lead to a movement of Rotarians creating a community project that took trash and made it into something beautiful and of value, such value it has the ability to support global initiatives and raise awareness on pollution on a global scale.
It shows that by partnering with an organisation like Rotary you can get the support to become the change in your local environment and move others to become part of the action.
If you would like to know join the next clean up event please contact Vic Grosjean and if you would like to know more about the artist Mocha Li, her website is https://www.mochawave.com/
Join the conversation and help us clean our oceans!
