HONY featured this guy today, which led me to the Facebook page and website of Glide Skateboards, which explain that they make “hand crafted boards made from reclaimed sustainable materials inspired by the graceful lines of surfing.” Check out the links for galleries of gym floors upcycled into elegant rides.
Photo by anthonyhallphoto.com
Tangentially related personal story:
These well-crafted boards are a far cry from my first and only skateboard, purchased from a dingy toy store in Harlem overcrowded with cheap plastic toys imported from sweatshops around the world. I wanted a cap gun, the kind the boys in my building used to run around shooting, but my parents forbade it. With regret, I gave up on that campaign and focused my lust on a thick wooden skateboard decorated on the underside with a Bruce Lee-inspired painting of a shirtless Asian man in jeans. I believe it asaid “Kung Fu” above his head, in Kung Fu font.
In retrospect, that skateboard was the first significant purchase I made with my own money. I saved my allowance for weeks and did extra chores for extra coin to reach my goal more quickly. Then, through much whining, I convinced my dad to walk me to the store on his day off and plunked down my money for the prize. I can still picture the shopkeeper taking my Kung Fu board off the display shelf behind the counter and handing it over.
Many happy trips to the park followed, where more often than riding the board upright, I would take it to the top of a hill, sit on it and grip the plastic hand grips on either side as I rolled to the bottom. It functioned mainly as a sled on wheels. It had a large red plastic bumper, which I could activate like a brake by lifting my legs up in the air, leaning back and using my butt to tip the end of the board toward the pavement. Good times.
A couple years later, a friend’s older brother declared my Kung Fu board a piece of shit and proceeded to prove its poor construction by slamming it repeatedly into the stoop until deep scratches stretched across the mildly offensive design and, finally, the flimsy wood splintered and split in two.
I guess the lessons here are that big brothers can be cruel and cheap things never last.
Forgive me, trashies, for I have splurged. Living in Brooklyn is a true test for a lover of upcycling. A slew of boutiques boasting fashionably recycled goods line the path between my apartment and the shops where I buy my groceries. I spotted this Kim White bag at Kaight a week ago and was taken by the Southwest design, even more so when I discovered the designer uses salvaged car upholstery.
Kim White Red Southwest Bag
From White’s website:
Why are Kim White Handbags so special? Made from vintage automotive fabrics, Kim White uses dead stock never-used textiles intended for use in American automobiles: cars, trucks and vans. She fortuitously unearthed an entire warehouse of automotive fabric, which may be the last existing stock anywhere in the US, and she is the sole owner of these amazing textiles.
I took a photo of the bag, waited a week and went back for it. As luck would have it, Kaight advertised a “shop your values” deal on Twitter so I got a slight break on the steep price. I figure fabric designed for the inside of cars aught to last a while. It’s cute, right?
Remember this sweet chandelier? I just learned that it’s coming to NYC for Earth Day!
Chandelier in Toronto, 2009
I have to say I get MANY, MANY Earth Day pitch emails, usually covering general green topics not directly linked to trash and most pimping a for-profit product. So I was extra thrilled to get word that a public art project I have admired from afar. It goes up tomorrow, here’s what the press release has to say about the installation, which opens tomorrow (I added the links):
A 21-foot tall sculpture in the form of a chandelier made of recycled plastic containers will hang above the World Financial Center Winter Garden’s famed marble staircase for an entire month starting on April 15th.
From April 15th through May 11th, visitors to the ten-story glass-vaulted atrium will be able to look up and see artist Katharine Harvey‘s stunning Chandelier, a 21-foot tall and 15-foot wide sculpture consisting of thousands of used plastic containers laboriously washed and strung together. The artist has transformed water bottles, sandwich trays, muffin tins, salad boxes, egg cartons, and more into a symbol of luxury and opulence while simultaneously commenting on the glut of plastic in consumer society.
And here’s more about the artist, also from the press release:
A resident of Toronto, Canada, Katharine Harvey, represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery, is known for creating sculptural installations that refashion plastic packaging and dollar-store items into startlingly beautiful works of art. Her paintings, light displays, and sculptures have been featured in galleries and public installations throughout the world, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto, Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Le Centre d’Exposition in Baie-St-Paul (Québec), and the Painting Center (New York). Group shows include the Galerie Art Mûr (Québec), Art Gallery of Regina, Saskatchewan, as well as residencies at Ivavvik National Park in the northern Yukon (2006) and The Banff Centre in Alberta (2003).
Local trashies, send photos and comments if you go check it out for yourselves. I plan to stop by sometime this week.
My roommate, Rubina, is an amazing cook and entertainer. I love living with her for many reasons, mainly because she’s a dear friend and a good sounding board on all of life’s most important issues. We discuss practically everything, but if you were to bug our place, you would find that well over half of our conversations center around food. Every once in a while those food conversations are comprised of brainstorming sessions over what we (read: she) could make to use up things in the fridge that are about to go bad. Rubina has a gift for trash-aversion recipes, which she says comes from growing up with immigrant parents who taught her the value of resourcefulness and the horror of wastefulness. I come from culturally similar stock, yet never cease to be surprised by the creativity Ruby employs to avoid throwing anything out. Case in point: the cheese crackers that just came out of our oven.
Mmmmm
We had a wee bit of blue cheese in the fridge and, because our friend Glenn had recently blown our minds by making a quiche out of it, we had blue cheese baked goods on the mind. Also on the verge of expiring: a bit of cheddar and some buttermilk purchased for another baking project long completed. So, Rubina whipped up a quick biscuit dough, rolled it out and with the round end of an icing tube decorating tip, cut the dough into tiny circles and baked those into jumbo oyster cracker sized bites. She made two batches of buttermilk cheese crackers: cornmeal blue cheese and whole wheat cheddar. Our house now smells amazing. Bet you wished you lived here, too.
You know who else is great at averting food waste? My friend, Virginia of Italicious. I’ve featured her Reused Recycled page here before. If you haven’t clicked through her site in while, check it out. Their family recently moved back to Italy, this time to the South, so it’s the dawn of a whole new chapter of food talk and recipes. I’m sad they’re far away, but delighted to live vicariously through the yummy posts.
Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11am-2pm, artist Gwyneth Leech sits inside the glass walls of the Flatiron Prow Art Space drawing on used coffee cups. The other night, my friend Phillip and I went to see the film The Artist after which he walked me to the Subway stop just in front of the Flatiron Building. It seemed perfectly appropriate to stumble onto such a whimsical project after seeing such a whimsical film.
Photo taken by Phillip on his phone. Thanks, Phillip!
The best description of this project (as well as lots of great photos and descriptions of the artist’s other work) can be found on her blog, Gwyneth’s Full Brew in the form of this conversation with a passerby as she was outside wiping finger, nose and palmprints off the windows:
A man came up to me carrying his takeout coffee (small brown cup, flat lid, wrapped in a napkin).
He asked rather belligerently, “What exactly is the point of this installation?”
I drew breath. He actually looked kind of angry.
“Well,” I said, “it is about the inventive potential of the human spirit. The artist has saved all her used paper coffee cups for years and she has drawn and painted on each one by hand. There must be almost 800 cups hanging in there. And each one is a different.”
“Oh!” He said, and stalked off, apparently satisfied.
The website for the art space says the artist would be sitting inside the prow through December 31, so I’m not sure if the live drawing element of the installation is still in progress or if this is the finished product. I kind of like not knowing. The stack of used cups not yet decorated beside a chair and a bunch of colored markers is a quiet reminder of the endless supply of disposable canvas we generate in this city, this country, this world…
Like many New Yorkers, I’ve been fighting off a nasty cold for what seems like forever. The other day I ventured out for soup at Born Thai where the food is actually spicy (unlike most places in my neighborhood) and where the menus are adorably upcycled CD ROM cases. Tom yummy in my tummy.
Beirut-based architect Sandra Rishani keeps a blog of her visions of what the city could be. Beirut the Fantastic posts outline proposals for upgrading and greening forgotten and unused spaces or places that have not reached their full potential. Her latest post focuses on the rubble of the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel and how that rubble could be used to create a beautiful seaside memorial.
Before
After
What I love about the blog is that Rishani writes about what are ostensibly pipe dream projects, but breaks them down step by practical step. In this case, for example, she goes into the history of the rubble, who dumped it where, current legal ownership of the materials and examples from around the world of war rubble upcycled into public parks and memorials.
Deepest apologies for the long gap in posts. I’ve been traveling nonstop for the day job and barely have time to sleep, let alone brave slow internet connections to upload photos and information. That’s not to say I haven’t been collecting trashtastic content. For example, women who take part in income generating activities with the Kisumu Medical Education Trust (KMET) upcycle plastic water bottles as zero waste packaging for the liquid soap they make and sell.
Woman sifts base for bar soap, liquid soap bottles in the background
Woman with finished liquid soap product
Young women training at KMET’s empowerment center learn marketable skills like tailoring. To practice, they use flour sacks and cardboard for patterns and swaths.
Young women practice stitching on recycled paper
Young women practice tailoring using patterns upcylced from empty sacks
Thanks for your patience, trashies. I’m in Ethiopia this week. Stay tuned for additional updates from East Africa.
Compost Mobile is a neat new project in Miami that matches people with food scraps to urban farmers in need of compost. The rallying call? “We want your scraps!” They are also the first ever recipient of an Awesome Food Grant. More here.
The experience, which is available to users of iPhone 4, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices, was constructed using theLayar browser, which makes use of a phone’s camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer to enhance what is seen with a layer of digital information. Users are able to view the landscape through their phone, and Freshkills Park+provides relevant information, audio, video, links and downloads in real time.
My friends Chloë and Jen got married this weekend in the most personal ceremony I have ever witnessed. The whole weekend, in fact, carried wonderful personal touches starting with a lobster bake — the one tradition shared between their diverse families.
Lobstah!
Prior to attending this event, I might have described myself as someone who knows how to eat a lobster. I’ve cracked my share of claws and tails. I know to suck and bite the smaller legs to drag out hidden bits of meat and flavor.
I was wrong. I now know I have been wasting lobster bits my whole life. Chloë has set me straight. I wish I had taken video, because I believe this woman to be the least wasteful consumer of lobster in the world and when her YouTube how-to video blows up, I wouldn’t mind cashing in on the web traffic.
Zero Waste Lobster
Not only does Chloë eat that weird green stuff inside the lobster, she collects the discarded carcasses of friends’ meals and scrapes up their green stuff, too. But it doesn’t end there. She then rips off the little pieces at the end of the tail and uses them as small scoops to collect the swampy water that pools on the plate when you bust open a boiled crustacean. And, if that’s not enough murky green water for her, she picks up the plate and slurps down the rest. Pictured here, the lovely bride demonstrates her technique as her approving mother urges her on.
I never realized how wasteful I have been in eating just the meat. Think of all the seafood diverted from landfills by this woman alone!
I kid, but Chloë and Jen are amazing and thoughtful women who care deeply about their friends and family and are conscientious about the environment as well.The Chuppah they stood under to exchange vows yesterday will get a second life as a trellis in Jen’s dad’s garden. I’m looking forward to anniversary photos to see what beautiful things have grown around it.
Choopah
Congratulations, Chloë and Jen! I hope you’re truly offline and enjoying your honeymoon!
Do you follow us on Facebook? If not, you’re missing out on some of the best everydaytrash.com content: photos and comments posted by YOU, the readers. Some of my favorite recent updates have come from Al Frank in Edina, Minnesota. Al is the father of my dear friend Lindsay and (in the nearly 15 years I’ve known their family at least) always has a home improvement project in the works. Lately, he has taken to refinishing dumpstered furniture. Here are two trashtastic examples:
A national bagel store was throwing out a bunch of chairs. The next stop was the dumpster. The manager said I could have some. I rescued 8 chairs. I took them apart and refinished them. My wife, Kathy, reupholstered them. We’ll now enjoy them at our cabin in Wisconsin.
Table
I made this table from Corian and a pine beam destined for the dumpster.
Thanks for sharing, Al! Fan us on Facebook, trashies! Post your projects, Facebook fans!
Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868) faced many of the same energy and environmental resource problems that the Western world faces today—namely shit running out fast.
I bring this up because a friend recently lent me an interesting book on the topic, Azby Brown‘sJust Enough: Lessons in Green Living from Traditional Japan. Using emblematic stories (“They are not fables. They are depictions of vanished ways of life told from the point of view of a contemporary observer, based on extensive research and presented as narrative), Brown lays out the life of the farmer, carpenter and samurai illustrated with hand-sketched diagrams of the design and tools employed by each to live as efficiently as possible.
Wood sketch
Each of the book’s three parts begins with a description of a particular category of citizen’s life during the period in question followed by these whimsically mapped out drawings, which in turn precede short bulleted chapters on what lessons we modern folk can extract, update and apply to our present day communities. Suggestions range from plant a garden to my personal favorite: “Build homes that are inspirational.”
Bath sketch
It’s an entertaining approach to the potentially dry topic of conservation, with the soothing message just enough repeated throughout. Garbage per se comes up infrequently because the Edo days produced little waste and found new uses for byproducts. The best illustration in the book is a centerfold spread of rice production, mapping how every part of the crop is named and used including hulls upcycled into “footwear, hats, aprons, mats, bags, rope, brush and many others!!” (Exclamation points are ok if handwritten next to little pictures of rice stalks.)
For those more digital than literary, Brown taped a talk on the Edo approach at TEDxTokyo. Interestingly, it’s pretty dull. The spirit of the book is hearkening back to a simpler time, which somehow doesn’t translate well to PowerPoint. So, if you’re interested, I recommend you get your hands, literally, on a hardcover copy and flip through the pictures.
