Huge Rabbits Storm Europe, Highlight Recycling

If you were traveling in Europe last year, you may have seen large orange bunnies like the ones pictured here. No, you weren't hallucinating (well, I'm assuming you weren't — unless you have something you'd like to tell me). They were actually part of the "Big Rabbits" art installation that took place in various European cities in 2009, courtesy of the Cracking Art Group, as a means of highlighting the need for recycling.

As reported by 1-800-Recycling.com, the group consists of six artists from Italy, Belgium and France, and the movement, which started in 1983, "was initiated with the intention of changing art history." A lofty goal, certainly, but if you're going to make goals, why not go for the gusto, right? And according to the group's website, they intend to make that change "through both a strong social and environmental commitment and the revolutionary use of different plastic materials that evoke a strict relationship between natural life and artificial reality."

The group uses recycled plastic in their pieces and, as the group notes, catalytic "cracking" is what turns petroleum into plastic, thus the name of the group itself. As noted by 1-800-Recycling.com, after one of the works have been shown, they're destroyed and the plastic material is used again for another of their projects.

So if your friends or family think you're nuts because you told them about the monstrous fuchsia snails you saw in Milan or the gold turtles you spotted in Venice, now you can feel safe in knowing they do in fact exist — and are there for a good cause.

Photo by Hannes De Geest via Flickr.