Waste World: Bill Posters takes on Black Friday

Black Friday has become one of the fixtures of the British retail year, imported from America and stretched into a long weekend that runs straight into Cyber Monday. This year it has picked up an uninvited companion. Across the country, advertising panels have been quietly opened and their contents replaced with posters that look like the real thing at first glance and then turn on the brands they appear to promote. The campaign is called Waste World, and it is the work of Bill Posters.

Who is behind it

Bill Posters is the working name of a British artist and campaigner, and one of the founders of Brandalism, the loose collective that has made a speciality of taking over outdoor advertising. Brandalism began in 2012, when a small crew swapped the posters in 36 billboards across five UK cities for artworks. Its best-known action came in Paris in 2015, when the COP21 climate talks were under way: around 600 fake adverts by 82 artists from 19 countries went up in the city’s street furniture, many of them aimed at the summit’s corporate sponsors. The tactic has a name, subvertising, and a growing international following.

The campaign

Waste World is timed for the biggest shopping event on the calendar and takes as its subject what happens to things once shopping is over: the clothes, the plastic packaging, the dead phones and laptops. The posters borrow the look of campaigns by Apple, Gucci, Nike and Pretty Little Thing, and use it to point at where large quantities of the rich world’s rubbish and so-called recycling actually end up. The mix is pointed: a sportswear giant, a luxury house, the world’s best-known phone maker and an online fast-fashion label whose whole model depends on clothes being cheap enough to wear a few times and throw away. The work draws on the current issue of New Internationalist, which is given over to waste, and aims to put the people who live with that waste back into the picture. The artist’s own project page sets the posters out in full.

In a statement accompanying the campaign Posters argued that shoppers fighting over televisions this weekend would do better to ask where their recycling goes. Most wealthy countries, he said, cannot or do not process all their own waste and instead sell it on to poorer countries in Asia and Africa, where much of it is simply dumped for lack of proper systems to deal with it. He cited a figure of 93 per cent. It matches the World Bank’s What a Waste 2.0 report, published in September, which found that 93 per cent of waste in low-income countries is dumped in the open, against 2 per cent in high-income ones. He did not soften the conclusion, describing the trade as a form of colonialism.

The timing gives the point extra weight. At the start of 2018 China stopped accepting most imported plastic waste, which for years had absorbed a large share of what Britain and the rest of Europe put out for recycling. Shipments have since been rerouted to countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, often with even less capacity to handle them.

No Ad Day and a manual

The campaign also lines up with No Ad Day, which artists started as a call to people around the world to clear advertising out of public space for one day, on Saturday 24 November 2018. To help other artists and graffiti writers take part, Posters has published what is billed as the first pocket-sized subvertising manual, a practical guide to taking over ad spaces, with the London radical publisher Dog Section Press.

There is a straight line from this work to the bus shelter keys that Jordan Seiler began handing out in New York a few years ago. The frame belongs to the advertising contractor; the argument is that the space it faces belongs to everyone else. Waste World gives that argument a harder edge. What goes in the frame this time is a set of numbers about who pays for the West’s consumption, and it arrives on the one weekend when the adverts it replaces are working hardest.