You're reading: Restaurant highlights plastic pollution with waste decoration for Halloween

What could be more spine-chilling than ghosts, vampires and zombies?

Plastic waste, Kyiv restaurant China Hi says.

When deciding how to decorate their eatery for Halloween, co-owners Misha Katsurin and Dasha Katsurina went with an unusual idea to use the occasion to highlight the world’s growing environmental crisis. Now their restaurant’s entrance is covered with dozens of filled plastic trash bags hanging from the awning outside of China Hi.

“We decided that ghosts and skeletons were not scary, but plastic in the ocean is really scary,” Katsurin told the Kyiv Post.

Every year, about eight million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean. There, sea creatures ingest or are entangled by plastic debris, which causes severe injuries and death. Numerous studies find that marine plastic pollution poses threats to human health, food safety and tourism. It also contributes to climate change, which the World Economic Forum’s annual report on global risks in 2020 called the main threat to humanity. 

Although Halloween, a popular holiday in the West, is not commonly celebrated in Ukraine, local restaurants and other businesses use the occasion to develop themed menus, hold parties and decorate their premises.

Dasha, 25, and Misha, 32, are a married couple who own some of the most popular eateries in Kyiv, all of which serve Asian cuisines. Apart from China Hi, their network includes the Thailand Hi restaurant and Vietnam Hi, a spot located at Kyiv Food Market.

In their other restaurants, the entrepreneurs introduced other Halloween-themed social initiatives, but only China Hi, located in Kyiv’s historic center, was decorated with plastic waste.

“In China Hi, we allow ourselves the bravest marketing antics,” Katsurin says.

 

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Допис, поширений Китайский Привет (@china.hi)

The owners developed the idea for the decorations along with famous Kyiv decorator Anna Bakhonko, 32. She was thinking of what materials could evoke an unpleasant, frightening feeling. Then, she says, garbage came to her mind.

Bakhonko imagined that people would not be able to see the beauty in her installations and thought: “Excellent! That’s exactly what I need.”

“The emotion from what you see will be negative, which means it really hurts, which means it is acute and scary,” Bakhonko told the Kyiv Post.

The plastic trash bags filled with other plastic waste, which “adorn” the restaurant’s entrance, were brought from the local sorting station No Waste Ukraine. After the holiday is over, it will all be transferred back and recycled.

To extend the message beyond marine plastic pollution, the entrepreneurs decided to draw attention to the issue of consumerism, which also contributes to overproduction and increased waste. Inside China Hi, the team decorated one of the zones with many used stuffed toys. They will later be donated to orphanages. 

Since the restaurant shared pictures of the new decorations on its social media on Oct. 22, some of its customers joined the initiative and brought their toys, which will now also be donated. One cleaning company also offered to clean all the toys before they are handed over to orphan children.

Apart from decorations, China Hi presents themed postcards to its customers. The postcards put a spotlight on the environmental crisis and various social issues, including poverty and violence.

One of the postcards depicts a caged dog. “That’s what is really scary,” it reads. “Let this Halloween remind us that any form of violence is not cool.”

Through their other restaurant, Thailand Hi, Misha Katsurin and Dasha Katsurina launched another social project. Starting on Monday, the restaurant will sell pumpkins along with their own recipe for how to cook them. The customers can also buy the eatery’s curry paste to accompany the dish. All the money received from the pumpkin sales will be donated to the Suka Zhizn (“Life’s a Bitch”) Foundation, an initiative that helps the homeless in Kyiv.

“Let’s talk about what’s really important this Halloween,” China Hi’s post on Instagram reads.