EDAW/AECOM’s Denver Office Creates Sculpture for 4th Annual ‘Design After Dark’

A Nerf ball, salvaged from the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch,” is the center peice of a sculpture created by EDAW/AECOM’s Denver office for the Denver Art Museum’s Design Council’s Design After Dark.

Photo courtesy of EDAW/AECOM

A deteriorating Nerf ball from the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” was the centerpiece of an environmental sculpture created by the local EDAW/AECOM office for the Design After Dark event hosted Friday by the Denver Art Museum’s Design Council.

The 4th Annual Design After Dark is promoted as an event that celebrates design in Colorado and also raises funds for the Department of Architecture, Design and Graphics at the Denver Art Museum.

Heather Saunders, a landscape designer in Denver’s EDAW/AECOM office, said the purpose of the Nerf ball sculpture is threefold: to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the least known but potentially most damaging environmental hazards in the world; to focus attention on the fact that many of the Earth’s more pressing environmental problems are out of sight and thus out of mind; and to advance awareness of global environmental issues.

“While we are all aware of the environmental challenges we have in our own backyards, few of us know about such enormous problems as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” Saunders explained. “The Garbage Patch consists primarily of discarded plastics and other floating debris, and it’s reportedly twice the size of Texas. The goal of our Nerf ball sculpture is to focus attention on the Garbage Patch and other environmental problems that are not in our own backyards.”

Also called a gyre, which is a whirlpool type vortex in the middle of the ocean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an enormous swirling mass that collects and keeps millions of tons of debris, sometimes for decades. Most of the trash comes from land, but it also comes from ships in the form of fishing nets, discarded trash and lost cargo containers. The Garbage Patch consists primarily of plastic goods, including sports gear, electronic products, and even laundry baskets, all of which hold extreme danger for marine life and birds such as pelicans, seagulls and albatross.

It is estimated that every year about one million seabirds choke or get tangled in the Garbage Patch debris and die, and some 100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins and other marine mammals and sea turtles suffer the same fate. Another danger with seaborne plastics is that they become covered with hydrophobic toxins like DDT. Sea animals confuse toxin-covered plastic for food, ingest it and then introduce it into the human food chain.

Eric Pearse, a landscape designer in the EDAW/AECOM office who coordinated the sculpture design team with Saunders, said the Nerf ball and other Garbage Patch debris was provided by Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a Long Beach, Calif., nonprofit dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the marine environment through research, education and initiatives.

“We didn’t really know what we were going to receive from Algalita when we were planning our sculpture, but when we saw that it was a Nerf Ball, it added a greater level of reality,” Pearse said. “It is easy to be disconnected from our impact on the environment, but a Nerf ball represents one of the most recognizable, commonly discarded items. That’s why we believed it would be a pretty powerful centerpiece in the sculpture.”

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