Clean Advertising, Clean Planet

I was reading last months Creativity magazine when I came across a beautifully simple and earth-conscious project called “The Reverse Graffiti Project”. My interest was instantly sparked because I’m actually a huge fan of well-done graffiti. Wondering what ‘reverse graffiti’ was, I visited the site – www.reversegraffitiproject.com. I found that this is a project powered by Green Works– a spin off from the Clorox Company that’s producing plant & mineral based biodegradable cleaning agents. As soon as I read that, it hit me what they were doing— they were cleaning dirty, smut-caked walls in cities in order to make earth conscious, artistic advertising! BRILLIANT! However, it made me somewhat question the reasoning behind it all— is Clorox really trying to help the planet? Are they just trying to make an extra buck or are they just trying to offset the damage they’ve already done to the planet with their normal line of Clorox products?

After reading a little more about it, watching the videos and rolling the concept of ‘clean art’ around in my head, I decided to focus on the positive instead of questioning the motives of Clorox. I came away from the site with two main ideas to take from this project: #1– Use of advertising that actually HELPS the environment instead of destroying it; #2– Make something “new” out of something already existing– a form of recycling, if you will. The basic ideas of ‘clean art’ have been around for a while and probably exist in many different forms. The most recent example I can think of was an email I got a while back about ‘dirty car art’.

I went on thinking about the 'clean art' concept and wondered how it could be applied to other means of advertising or life in general. Seems like a lot of individuals and companies are starting to become more interested in 'earth friendly' alternatives to just about everything. I'm glad people are starting to finally wake up and realize just how much we impact the health of our planet. So, the questions still stand– how can these ideas be used to make something 'new' out of something pre-existing for use as an advertisement? What are other people already doing that's recycling pre-existing objects and making them into something new?