A Giant Christmas Tree Made Of Old Sprite Bottles

Money is tight in Lithuania. The country has been adjusting to life under harsh austerity measures since Lehman Brothers collapsed. So when the textile artist Jolanta Šmidtienė was asked to design a public Christmas decoration for the town hall square in the city of Kaunas, she challenged herself to create something cheap.

Her solution? A Christmas tree made out of 32,000 old plastic Sprite bottles. She cut the bottles in half and strapped the bottoms together with zip ties to make those spiky green hemispheres. Then she hung those hemispheres on a roughly 40-foot scaffold, around a real tree. At night, the orbs are lit from inside with 40,000 lights. It’s a dramatic scene.

It’s not an energy neutral display, of course. The lights use electricity. But Šmidtienė’s work is a nice reminder that there often are useful–or at least artistic–ways of repurposing plastic trash. We’ll assume the top halves of the bottles were recycled.

If you’re interested in a less environmentally destructive Christmas yourself, but don’t have time to wrestle 32,000 plastic bottles into a work of art, there are companies, like this one in Los Angeles, that will rent you a living Christmas tree.

Who Do Indians Bribe Most?

If the Lokpal Bill ever gets cleared by the Indian Parliament, episodes of everyday corruption, widely perceived as endemic, may finally start to decline.

Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

At the moment, the figures are not encouraging, according to a new study by the Berlin-based anticorruption group Transparency International.

The report, “Daily Lives and Corruption,” offers fresh data on bribery in South Asia based on a survey of 7,500 people taken over the past two years. The results are alarming: they suggests that 39% of South Asians who had to deal with public services in the previous year admitted to paying a bribe.

In India, more than half of the people surveyed, or 54% of respondents, said they’ve paid a bribe. This was only worse in Bangladesh, where the figure is 66%, or two out of every three people. In Pakistan, the figure was around 50%, in Nepal 32%, in Sri Lanka 32% and in the Maldives 6%.

As the Indian Parliament readies to vote on the government’s proposal to set up the Lokpal, a anticorruption ombudsman, it’s worth taking a closer look at where corruption happens at a grass-roots level.

The study, which was broken down into nine public services, shows that across the region policemen were more likely to receive a bribe than most other institutions.

In India, the most common reason people say they’ve paid a bribe is to speed things up, followed by wanting to avoid getting in trouble with authorities, the study shows.

Take a look at how frequently Indians pay bribes when dealing with the following public services:

Police: 64%

Land services (buying, selling, renting and inheriting property): 63%

Registry and permit services: 62%

Tax revenue: 51%

Utilities (including water, telephone, electricity services): 47%

Judiciary: 45%

Customs: 41%

Medical services: 26%

Education: 23%

India’s bribery patterns were comparable to those in Bangladesh and Pakistan, where policemen were also found to be the number one bribe takers. In Sri Lanka, bribing tax authorities was far more common.

The creation an independent corruption complaints agency at the national level along with parallel state-level units in India will offer citizens a powerful tool to fight corruption and hopefully bring these numbers down.

Earlier this month, Transparency International released its yearly corruption rankings, which measured how common corruption is perceived to be in over 180 nations. All South Asian countries scored poorly, including India.