THE VAULT

The PETing Vault is a documented material archive: every colour of post-consumer PET bottle Leo Haz has worked with since 2008, photographed, sorted, and held in his studio in Braunau am Inn. It is not a stockroom. It is a registry — the third leg of provenance behind every PETing work, alongside the patented process and the artist's signature.

On 1 January 2025, Austria introduced a national PET deposit (Pfand). For more than a decade prior, Haz collected bottles personally and through his network — neighbours and acquaintances who otherwise would have driven their plastic to the recycling yard. With the Pfand system, that informal economy ended. The Vault is what remains of an era that is now historically closed.

Twelve of the eighteen archived colours have not been produced for years. One translucent black has been out of supermarkets for over a decade; coloured Römerquelle Emotion bottles were retired in April 2021; the iconic green 7Up bottle was replaced with clear rPET in 2022; the Römerquelle Flowers edition was produced once — twelve bottles exist, all in this archive. Each PETing work consumes specific entries from this archive. There is no resupply.

Each PETing certificate of authenticity now references the specific Vault entries used in the work. Pre-2026 works receive a retroactive provenance slip on request — issued, signed, and stamped from the studio archive.