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Ethyl, the life-size blue whale sculpture commissioned by Monterey Bay Aquarium, was built around a steel frame and covered with more than 750 hand-formed tiles made from post-consumer HDPE plastic collected around Monterey Bay. The plastic was not retrieved from the ocean. Artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova, working with arts consultancy Building 180 and a large volunteer team, spent months turning discarded containers into a sculpted skin for the 82-foot artwork.
What Ethyl was—and what “recycled plastic” means here
Monterey Bay Aquarium commissioned Ethyl for display at San Francisco’s Crissy Field. The 82-foot sculpture represented a blue whale at life size, with a steel superstructure supporting its outer skin of recycled plastic tiles. The project joined artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova with Building 180, more than 20 artists, and uncounted volunteers.
The feedstock was post-consumer plastic gathered around Monterey Bay, including milk jugs, detergent bottles, and food barrels. It was not ocean-recovered debris. Make: clarified that distinction in its October 19, 2018 process account: the plastic came from discarded consumer items, not from the sea.
How the plastic skin was made
1. Collect, sort, wash, and shred HDPE
The team chose high-density polyethylene, or HDPE (#2). Make: reports that the artists selected it because of its low melting temperature and their belief that it would not off-gas at that temperature; that was their project-specific rationale, not a general safety guarantee. The recipe describes about 5,000 pounds of HDPE being collected, with three Bay Area recycling centers donating plastic.
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Containers were sorted to remove stray non-HDPE waste, cut into manageable pieces, washed, and shredded in a small wood chipper. The flakes were then sorted by color and brightness so the artists could control how the finished surface read.
2. Heat and press the flakes into tiles
The sorted flakes were heated in sheet pans, then pressed into plywood forms using a car jack and left to cool. The process yielded more than 750 tiles, each weighing about 4–5 pounds, with a combined coverage of roughly 1,500 square feet, according to Make:’s 2018 recipe.
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Color was part of the sculpting. The artists trimmed and arranged the tiles to create variations of light and shadow across the whale’s body, rather than treating the panels as a uniform shell.
3. Attach tiles to the steel skeleton
The whale’s strength came from a steel frame fabricated in 17 sections, largely from square steel tubing. A rebar skin framework provided attachment points; pipe straps and similar hardware fastened the finished tiles onto it. This separation of structure and surface let the steel carry the sculpture while the recycled plastic formed its visible body.
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Some details used a different treatment: portions of 65 smooth, unshredded blue and white food-grade HDPE barrels formed the eyes, mouth, and ventral pleats. Those sculptural features contrasted with the pressed, flake-based tiles used across the body.
A months-long collaborative build
The artists prototyped the process in June 2018. Make: reports that panel production took 4½ months, metal fabrication took 4–5 weeks, and installation at Crissy Field took four days. The work involved more than 20 artists and an uncounted number of volunteers. Water from washing the plastic was routed through a donated greywater filtration system, according to the same account.
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Artist Joel Dean Stockdill described the project’s central image this way: “It’s a strange twist on our relationship with the whales. We used to kill them for their oil — now we’re turning oil-based plastics into a whale, to try and help rid the oceans of plastic.”
What happened to the sculpture afterward
The Crissy Field display ended in January 2019. Building 180 later reported that Meow Wolf acquired Ethyl in 2019 and that it was moved to Santa Fe Community College, where it served as a learning tool in a sustainability curriculum. Building 180 also states that the project received a 2019 Guinness World Records award as the world’s largest recycled plastic sculpture; that record claim is attributed here to Building 180.
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What the project demonstrates—and what it does not
Ethyl shows how a team can turn a large volume of post-consumer HDPE into a striking public artwork through sorting, cleaning, shredding, pressing, and careful assembly. It is also a demonstration of hand-scale plastic reuse, not evidence that recycling alone resolves marine plastic pollution. As Monterey Bay Aquarium science outreach manager Kera Panni put it: “Recycling is not enough because plastics aren’t a closed loop like glass or steel; plastic’s quality degrades each time you recycle it.”
The project’s significance lies in making that tension visible: a whale-shaped sculpture built from discarded oil-based material can prompt attention to plastic waste, while its labor-intensive process and limited role remain distinct from a solution to the wider pollution problem.
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