I had been looking at this scene for nearly two weeks. What appeared to be, from across the Rue de Rivoli, a festive collection of artificial Christmas trees on the place in front of the 4th arrondisement mairie.

What I didn’t realize for the first week was … these “trees” are constructed, ingeniously, from some common but unexpected materials.

From a distance, all of the “trees” look quite a lot like … trees. Or at least an expensive artificial tree of the sort you would pay good money for in a Paris department store.

Very green … nicely conical … six-plus feet tall.

It is only when you get closer (like closing in on an impressionist painting) that the overall look is lost and the specific comes into focus … and you realize that the green “branches” of the trees are made of crushed plastic bottles of sparkling mineral water.

Parisians, of course, generate scads of empty water bottles every day, and they particularly love their green bottles of Perrier and/or Badoit fizzy water.

Paris, and France, do a pretty good job of recycling, and they have been at it for more than a decade. Paper here, plastic here, bottles over there.

Most of it goes to recycling plants, but a clever person of an artistic bent realized he could bring a more festive air to the holiday season by turning them into recycled-plastic Christmas trees.

It gets a little more sophisticated when empty red bottles are placed on the structure, apparently meant to represent red decorations on the green “fir” tree. And the blue bottle caps provide yet another bit of color to the look.

It’s all very clever, as well as festive and, we hope from the pictures above and the closeup (below), photogenic, too.