The FIJI bottle’s original copy—itself a sort of poem—promotes the bottle’s contents (EARTH’S FINEST WATER) as UNTOUCHED: “free from / human contact. / Until you unscrew / the cap.” That the industry’s chief selling point is its product’s distance from human industry creates an obvious paradox, but a more intimate irony lies at the heart of FIJI’s offer: to ensure that the consumer alone can break the seal dividing polluting person from pristine, virginal nature, a dirty pleasure delivered one bottle at a time.

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Of course, that’s not how this works anymore. In the Anthropocene, there’s no place over there, no matter how remote, that is “untouched” by humanity. In fact, we have always stood not outside or above the Earth’s grand ecology, but very much within it, one among trillions of interdependent elements. No careful plastic seal could ever divide humans from that intricate system, because the boundary was never more than rhetorical—and pointing out our enmeshment in the world around us has become an imperative in the era of climate change. 

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It’s not a question then of drilling deeper, either to tap fresh resources or bury old trash. Rather we must take stock of the materials at hand, recommit ourselves to creative re-use. And so in this experiment with recycling, I hoped to practice both the constraints and opportunities of living with limited resources. The task was surprisingly generative, full of more varied stories and images than the label had ever hinted at—hopefully it’s a positive omen for the expansive reimagining of things the way we find them now.