Recycling is crucial to a sustainable city. While blue-yellow-brown colour bins are available on Hong Kong’s streets to collect waste papers, aluminum cans and plastic bottles, collecting glass has received little attention.
Citygate Outlets is giving discarded glass bottles a second life by integrating sustainability from an artistic perspective. It has partnered with three award-winning Gen-Y green architects to conjure an unprecedented annual sustainability campaign “Beyond Glass”.
“Beyond Glass” combines architectural and ecological elements to promote the sustainable development of Lantau Island. It is also part of the Sustainable Development 2030 Strategy of the mall’s mother company, Swire Properties, to advance the three core values of Placemaking, Resources and Circularity, and Biodiversity through an artistic approach.
Apart from supporting green art, “Beyond Glass” spearheads sustainability and green shopping through four elements. The highlight is the “Shadows of Butterflies” art installation, in which 600 vitreous butterflies made from 200 out of 800 kilograms of used glass bottles were collected from the mall to evoke the conservation of rare butterflies on Lantau Island.
Other elements include a three-hour “Healing Journey: The Trail of Butterflies” co-organised with the social enterprise Nature Bathing; “Go Green” workshops that give post-consumption objects a new life; and “Green Up” rewards that encourage customers to bring their own containers.
“Butterflies is our theme because Lantau Island is home to more than 100 species of butterflies, representing 40 percent of butterflies in Hong Kong,” says Gloria Fung, General Manager of Citygate. “Through this unique piece of artwork, we hope to raise awareness of environmental protection and ecological conservation, and encourage the recycling of waste materials.”
She stresses the importance of biological diversity and conservation especially in Lantau Island, which is endowed with a rich variety of natural resources. She hopes that the beautiful art installations can inspire people to be creative when giving a second life to discarded materials.
The creators of the 600 colourful butterflies are Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition participants Arnold Wong, Keith Chan, and Stephen Ip. With six years’ experience in glass recycling, they worked with their ten-person team including experts in recycling, transport and installation to collect used glass bottles from tenants of Citygate Outlets every two weeks for five months.
The bottles were cleaned and sorted with labels removed. Only colourful and crystal-clear ones were selected and broken down into 5 to 10-mm particles. This was followed by the making of a complex three-dimensional geometric mold. The first butterfly model was 3D printed and reshaped into a butterfly-shaped device using glass.
Nearly 80 percent of the material is composed of glass with the rest of additives and pigments. The result is 600 dancing butterflies in natural flying elegance.
“As architects, we study building materials in the hope of inventing future building materials while preserving the characteristics of the material itself, such as the permeability of glass, because no other recycled materials are comparable,” they explain.
They are also pleased that advancements have been made in glass recycling technology. “The glass bricks we made a few years ago were only 50 percent glass and after improving the formula, we successfully increased the glass content to 80 percent and reduced the amount of additives,” they add. Ultimately, they hope to make recycled glass into a building material.
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“Shadow of Butterflies” Upcycled glass art installation
Date: 1 November 2023 onwards
Location: The Atrium on L2, Citygate Outlets, Tung Chung
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