
For the past two years, Genny Rietze collected more than 7,000 fruit and vegetable sticker labels to create her wearable art dress “The Little Things.”
The dress is a nod to her philosophy that “even the little things we do can make a big difference,” Rietze said.
“It seems so basic to me,” Rietze said of her original conception for the dress. “Fruit stickers are cool, but they’re also a plastic waste. I thought it would be so easy to put them on a dress.”
Fifty-five people saved the stickers they peeled from apples, avocados, zucchini, tomatoes, oranges and other fruits and vegetables, and gave them to Rietze. “I received tons of banana (stickers), which was useful for the project because they’re bigger and brighter,” Rietze said.
She even received stickers from Japanese satsuma oranges and German gala apples.
In her attic where she worked on the garment, she organized the thousands of stickers into colored piles and when she knew where they would go, sewed and glued them to a second-hand dress. “It’s extremely heavy,” Rietze said. “There’s a lot of plastic on there.”
She plans to enter the dress into the Southeast Alaska State Fair’s wearable art competition.
Rietze said she first became mindful about her own waste when she became a mother two years ago. “I was cleaning and de-cluttering and trying to simplify,” Rietze said. “I felt the weight of where my stuff was going. You can get rid of it from your house, but it has to go somewhere. It doesn’t count if you just chuck it out. It’s still cluttering the earth somewhere.”
In the two years she’s spent stitching and gluing the sticker waste that flowed into her house, her family has worked to reduce their overall waste stream. When the tug of acquisition pulls at them, she and husband Harry Rietze try to question whether they really need whatever they’re considering buying.
“Usually we don’t,” Rietze said. “It’s harder in Haines because a lot of plastic waste comes from packaging. We don’t have some of the bulk options bigger cities have. But once you’re more mindful, you can buy a lot of things with less packaging. A big one was we switched to using cloth napkins instead of paper towels.”
Sarah Elliott and her children saved stickers for Rietze’s dress. Elliott said Rietze’s efforts have inspired her to be more conscious of how they use things in their home. “I got some reusable towels,” Elliott said. “I started bringing cloth bags to the store. I built my own compost bin. Genny’s very encouraging and practical in her approach. It makes people like myself change a few little things. If everyone just changed a few little things, we can all make a big change.”
According to plasticoceans.org more than 300 million tons of plastic is produced annually, half of which is single use. More than 40 percent of plastic is used only once before it is thrown away, according to nationalgeographic.org.
The Haines Friends of Recycling center on Small Tracts Road accepts #1 and #2 plastics.