Some Soccer-Related Recycling

While researching the previous post about polyhedral, soccer-ball-shaped cartons, I found the inset photo on right, identified on the PingMag site as “a soccer ball made out of empty plastic bottles.”

I’d recently seen an article in the NY Times with a photo of an African boy holding a homemade soccer ball. (More photos of homemade African soccer balls: here)

But this ball (on right) was no impromptu, functional solution—(at least not to the problem of wanting to play soccer and not having a ball.) According to PingMag this ball was part of an initiative to help South African crafters find business opportunities in connection with the Wold Cup games. Hence: “Some crafters got commissioned to create big soccer balls out of a whole range of different materials, like bead, wire, paper…”

While there’s no credit identifying who made the crafted soccer ball, it does looks strikingly similar to the sputnik-style pendent light below, made by South African design studio, Magpie Design. (See also: Dodecahedron-shaped Box)

(More soccer-related recycling, after the fold…)

There are any number of other polyhedral and geodesic shapes that might serve as the structural underpinnings for this type of sputnik-style array of bottles. The soccer ball, perhaps is a convenient reference point. Also used in the Diet Pepsi example above from Yuji’s Design Laboratory’s Flickr Photostream.