Strawpocalypse is a Guinness World Record–holding installation by 📝Benjamin Von Wong that turned 168,000 used plastic straws into two crashing ocean waves, unveiled at Estella Place in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in January 2019.
Subtitled "The Parting of the Plastic Sea," the sculpture stands 3.3 meters tall, 8 meters long, and 4.5 meters wide. Visitors walk between the two waves: blue, green, and black straws form the body of the water, orange and yellow straws the sand at its base, and white straws the froth at its crest. Guinness World Records certified it as the largest drinking straw sculpture in the world.
The straws were gathered over six months by Zero Waste Saigon, Starbucks Vietnam, and cleanup groups across the country, then washed and sorted by color by volunteers for two weeks before assembly. Between 20 and 50 volunteers built the sculpture over multiple days. The piece exemplifies the participatory method behind Von Wong's 📝Conversation Generating Art: hundreds of ordinary people building something monumental out of the waste they generate, so the story of the making spreads as far as the image itself.