May 1st is Decorative Dumpster Day. Each year, my colleagues in trash Little Shiva and Ruby Re-usable and I take a day to post photos of and reflect upon the containers in which we store our waste. Today our sites everydaytrash.com, The Visible Trash Society and Olympia Dumpster Divers will share links from our own collections and maybe a few from around the blogosphere. Happy DDD!
My kick ass friend and fellow blogger Oriana of the amazing site Brooklyn Spaces has a lovely “honorary Brooklyn” post of right now featuring Austin’s Cathedral of Junk.
Cathedral of Junk
Looks like a magical place and yet another reason I need to get to Austin.
“The question we must ask ourselves is who and what are waste?”
My friend, Myra, sent me photos of a show she spotted while attending a conference this weekend at Hampshire College. And of course, this being the future, online video tells the story best.
Click here to find out more about this innovative work reimagining dumpstered skateboards, discarded plastic water bottles and countless other materials we sometimes think of as waste. I wish I’d taken a Design, Art and Technology class as an undergrad!
Thanks for the tip, Myra!
Happy Monday, trashies!
Thanks for the tip, Elizabeth!
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.
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).
Look out for a giant recycling bin in Times Square on Monday, 4/30.
The Great Recycle
According to the news release I just received:
In a show of support for New York City’s pledge to double recycle efforts by 2017, Honest Tea and partners GrowNYC, Recyclebank, Coca-Cola Live Positively, Global Inheritance and Five-Boro Green Services will place a 30-foot tall recycling bin in Times Square and attempt to crowd-source recycle more than 45,000 plastic, glass and aluminum beverage containers in ten hours. The plastic bottles collected will be recycled into essential gardening supplies including shovels, watering cans and plastic lumber, which will be used to build and cultivate an urban garden for PS 102, an elementary school in Harlem.
Send photos and comments if you spot it, trashies.
Garblogging would be a somber pastime if not for all the fun and creative people out there making incredible things out of trash. Seeking playful cheer in your life? Follow Haute Trash on Facebook. Trashtastic fashions made from whimsically reimagined materials.
Trashion at its best.
I’ve seen this chic zero waste lasagne recipe printed straight onto the noodles in a few places recently. Kinda bobo, but I’m totally into it. I love that you can still read the words on the finished product. Has anyone tried it?
Delicious design
Since 1999, Singapore’s only landfill has occupied a portion of the island of Pulau Semakau. To draw connections between this removed resting place of trash and the daily lives of the people who contribute to it, artist Zinkie Aw took a series of dustbin portraits.
Photo by Zinkie Aw
She calls the series the “Republic of Pulau Semakau” as each depicts a person holding a wastebasket in front of his or her face. In her words: “The things we throw away tell us so much about who we are.”
This whimsical project hits a chord for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that my own interest in trash began as an interest in my local island landfill.
Know how I found out about Zinkie’s work? The everydaytrash.com Facebook page. You, too, can discover neat new things there. Fan the page, and while you’re at it, fan the Republic of Pulau Semakau page, too.
Mark your calendars and polish your hitchhiking thumb, it’s that time of year again. What time of year, you ask? Well, time for the good people of Beverly Mass. organize a wondrous community event called the Trashfinder’s Ball, a benefit for the local farmer’s market, now immortalized in a documentary film.
A trophy made from trash will be awarded to the person bearing the best “trash find” and there will be a catwalk to strut your stuff in recycled fashions. If you’re anywhere in the area, it’s Saturday, March 31, 2012 7:00PM at the
Franco-American Club, 44 Park Street, Beverly, Mass.
Go! Take pictures and send them my way!
Early into my trash blogging career, people started to send me links to photographer Chris Jordan‘s work, which over the years I have turned over into several posts. This latest link (thanks, Chelsea!) is a talk by the artist himself, describing how he strives to help the viewer visualize incomprehensibly large numbers, and to “make global issues personal.” Check out what he has to say about his work and what a replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night made of 50,000+ discarded cigarette lighters has to do with the Pacific Gyre. It’s a frightening tale of the consequences of plastic. As Jordan puts it, “This is the Earth’s alarm system going off…”
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.
Bon appetit, trashies!
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Never too late for a trash-themed Valentine. LOVE this tour of the shiny eggs via New York Shitty (blog name extra apt on a post like this).
Reminds me of an afternoon I spent in the area, marveling at the digester eggs and melancholy shoreline.
Check it New Yorkers, the city has a site to match commercial waste to people who could put that crap to use and sells it to them on the cheap. It’s win-win: cheap stuff for the citizen, less waste for the city to haul.
The site lists neat stats on total cost savings, tonnes of trash averted and numbers of members and exchanges. The numbers date back to 1998, which leads one to believe this little-known-service has been around for a while but is just now getting a tech refresh. Does your community have something like this?
via Brokelyn
everydaytrash 