If you are not already a regular reader, Art for Housewives should be part of your daily diet of nifty blog intake. Last night I discovered these lovely recycled paper shoes via A for H (nice to look at, though a bit steep in price given the materials…perhaps I’ll try to weave my own).
Paper shoes by Colin Lin
You may recall the same source led me to these hot fused plastic boots. It’s been an interesting year for upcycled footwear.
Stunning photos of a garbage truck converted into an uberorganized mobile home are making the virtual rounds after being posted by a website that offers reliable campervan hire in Australia. I saw them on MAKE magazine.
Trashtastic RV exterior
Trashtastic RV interior
The trouble with getting into garbage is the everburning tug of consumerism. The more time you spend reading and thinking about consumerism, making less and wasting less, the more cool stuff you come across made out of trash or related materials. MAN DO I WANT THIS THING. Especially the kitchen. But really, what would I do with it?
Just read the inside label of my snowpants to discover the insulation is made from recycled nylon. Who knew trash could keep you so warm?
Leila attempts snowshoeing
Seasons greetings from the frigid prairies of Minnesota. Hope you’re keeping warm wherever you are!
Harnessing the worldwide attention on environmental issues sparked by the UN meeting in Copenhagen, local Danish architects built a city out of shipping containers and set up a sustainability expo inside.
Stacked Shipping Container Pavilion @ COP15
Scientists have come up with yet another way to upcycle plastic bags, this time into nanotubes that can be used to make batteries. According to Discover magazine, however, it’s a pricey process.
It involves an expensive catalyst in cobalt acetate, which is not easily recovered, to convert the high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into carbon nanotubes. But if the nanotubes are then used to make lithium-ion or lithium-air batteries, that might overcome this problem, since these batteries are already recycled at the end of their use to recover cobalt.
Click here for more on how to make a nanotube. Or watch this video from Stanford.
While in Ethiopia last week, I stopped into a silver store to check out trinkets, including antique Coptic crosses. The Ethiopian cross, if you haven’t seen one before, has a distinctive elongated shape and cross hatch pattern, so abstracted from the traditional European kind of cross that you can’t always tell immediately that that’s what they are.
Austrian coins, Ethiopian cross, coin cross
In Addis, I learned that these shapes vary by region and era and that collecting examples from around the country and throughout its history are a popular hobby among people interested in the country—expat bingo if you will (just kidding, I am sure collecting crosses reflects a deep interest in Ethiopian history and culture). Anyway, it wasn’t the traditional cross that caught my eye, but some examples of crosses cut out of old Austrian coins from the Colonial era. It seems Ethiopians more interested in the Colonialist’s religion than his currency “upcycled” old Austrian silver coins into silver crosses. As you can see, the coin cross is shaped more like the Western shape we are used to. That’s because this upcycling was done by Protestants rather than members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Of course, I couldn’t resist picking one up as a souvenir, which as a non-believer and non-Christian may not be put to much use, I just had to have a 200-year old sample of upcycling!
I’m in Kampala this week, attending the International Conference on Family Planning on behalf of the day job. Tonight at the opening session, I was surprised to see the first lady of Uganda on the program.
First Lady Janet Museveni offers me a hi-five (not photoshopped, I swear).
Before today the only reproductive health activities I’d ever heard of her taking part in were events to promote abstinence. She has led a march of virgins, offered scholarships for virgins (not sure how one would prove eligibility) and last year held a big virgin party. During her speech tonight, opening the conference and welcoming participants to Uganda, was apparently the first time she had ever uttered the term “family planning” publicly. That may not sound like much, but in a country where birth control pills remain highly controversial,women have an average of two more children then they want, skyhigh rates of unintended pregancy lead to skyhigh rates of unsafe abortion (it’s legal only to save a woman’s life here) which in turn lead to skyhigh rates of maternal death, it’s a pretty big deal. To thank her for participating, the conference organizers presented the first lady with a gift. They wanted something made by Ugandans entirely out of Ugandan materials. Their choice: a handbag made of recycled drinking straws cleaned at soda factories, flattened by hand and woven by a local association of women artisans.
Ugandan women making crafts from straws
There you have it: progress + upcycling. Not a bad start to a meeting.
One day, I will own my own brownstone. Or at least half of one. My sister can have the other half. And inside this brownstone will be enough room for a dining room table to cook for my friends and a desk by a window so I can work from home. I will sit in this:
Upcycled Vespa chair by bel & bel via Inhabitat
New Yorkers, save the date for November 14th. Quad Cinema will screen Counterbalance, a new film about waste pickers in Dehli as part of the 8th Annual Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival. Event starts at noon. $15 general admission, $12 students and IAAC members. Purchase tickets here. Check out the Facebook invite for details here.
Wastepickers, photo via Chintan
Here’s a description:
Every day, tens of thousands of waste pickers and waste recyclers in Delhi earn their income from collecting, selling and recycling trash. Their work, measured to be highly efficient, has not only been undervalued but even marginalized with the introduction of large private companies. This is the story of two municipalities in Delhi: one that has incorporated the work of the waste recyclers as part of the formal waste system, while the other has taken another direction.
Counterbalance is the product of a partnership between the video advocacy group WITNESS and the Indian environmental group Chintan. You can watch an interview with Bharati Chaturvedi, the film’s director and the founder and director of Chintan, here and here.
And for more about WITNESS, click here. For more about Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, click here.
Thanks for the tip, Elizabeth!
In August, we asked ourselves what in the world would happen to 750,000 clunker$ that were expected to be the outcome of the Cash for Clunkers programme (or as it’s actually called, the Car Allowance Rebate System; CARS), i.e. the old cars that americans have been allowed to trade in for a cash bonus, with the condition that the car would be subject to recycling, when buying a new car. A couple of months down the line, the New York Times alert us that all is not well:
Under the program, the cars are required to be crushed or shredded within six months of the date the vehicle is transferred from the dealership. Recyclers say the deadline, even a few months away, will be hard as they try to remove spare parts like transmissions, front and rear axles, starters and alternators.
Clearly, there are consequences that were not really thought of, although how on earth you can do policy implementation analysis this poor is beyond my wits. It seems as if deadlines will now be extended, but it proves that just because you have a great political idea that people agree with (not that CARS is one of them, but that’s another discussion), it doesn’t mean that things will automatically fall into place. Or in short, a society with less waste requires excellent civil servants in order to be sustainable. Municipal architects of the world, please report.
If you walk down Valencia (which incidentally is a must when visiting San Francisco), you should stop by Casa Bonampak, at #1051, and take a look at these beauties. Best upcycled bags I ever saw, with bonus that they were made in a Salvadorian cooperative. Shop ’til you drop.
San Francisco bags
It’s been a full year since my friend, Virginia (a.k.a. Jenny) began Italicious, a blog that chronicles the Italian (and sometimes Southern American) cooking that nourishes the charmed life she and her Neopolitan husband seem to lead. My FAVORITE thing about her blog is that she not only shares ideas for how to mix mouth watering combinations of amazing ingredients—sausage, fennel, home made pastas, dark leafy greens, saffron, cheese, etc.—but she’ll often include next-day recipes for how to recycle the leftovers, old school Italian style. And you know how we love to recycle! Recently, she added an entire “Reused, Recycled” page to the site to cull these recipes in one place. Check. It. Out.
Crochette di Riso via Italicious
Pictured above are tasty rice balls made from leftover risotto. You may remember the zero waste pasta pie featured here before. SUCH amazing stuff. Happy birthday, Italicious!
Tested in Omaha and coming soon to a city near you, EcoATM is a vending machine that takes gadgets and dispenses coupons, vouchers and cash. The working prototype takes only old cell phones, but the company plans to add mp3 players, digital cameras and more to the list of recyclables.
EcoATM
via Neatorama
everydaytrash 