26-04-2016

cycle & recycle or the beauty of waste as Paul Bulteel sees it

Belgium,

What could be “greener” than recycling? Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel explored the unsuspected beauty of our daily waste, which has been given a second chance through the reuse of recovered materials.



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cycle & recycle or the beauty of waste as Paul Bulteel sees it What could be “greener” than recycling? Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel explored the unsuspected beauty of our daily waste, which has been given a second chance through the reuse of recovered materials.



If you take a close, careful look at the photography book “cycle & recycle” by Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel, you realise the perfect appropriateness of the untranslatable German term “Wertstofftrennung” - separating valuable materials to indicate the sorting of our daily waste into different categories for subsequent processing and/or recycling.





Because in Paul Bulteel's photos of material sent for recycling we can see something we never would have dreamt of finding: the beauty of colours, of patterns, of textures.
The photographer's deep interest in one of the major sustainability issues comes about because Belgium has one of the highest recycling rates in the world: 80% of its packaging and 41% of its plastic is transformed into new, reusable materials





In order to make this issue as interesting and appealing as possible, it is necessary to engage people, and what better medium than photography in our image-dominated era? Paul Bulteel therefore visited recycling facilities of different materials in Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, documenting the truly bewildering beauty of what we throw away and that, like the mythical phoenix, can rise again from the ashes.



Far from accusatory rhetoric, what Bulteel shares in his book “cycle & recycle”, published by Hatje Cantz is the omnipresent waste in our modern life. An insightful look behind the scenes that gives us an idea of the huge potential of a simple action for the common good - separating waste for processing and recycling, so we don't have to keep depleting our natural resources and we can restrict the environmental impact of our very existence.
Something even more important, now that we have seen the aesthetic side of the question!

Christiane Bürklein

“cycle & recycle”
by Paul Bulteel
edited by Hatje Cantz, 2016
Images: © Paul Bulteel http://www.paulbulteel.eu/

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