Upcycling in Kisumu, Kenya

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by

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.

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Posted in Upcycling | 4 Comments »

Low Waste Wedding: Librarian Edition

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 by

Remember those card catalog cards the Brooklyn Museum was giving away? Well, my librarian friend, Jennie, also scored a batch and put them to excellent use. At her beautiful fall wedding last weekend, we looked up our names to find our table assignments.

Card Catalog

My friend Myra models our cards

The happy couple

Congratulations Jennie and Ben!

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Posted in Artistic Trash | 4 Comments »

Compost Mobile

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 by

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.

Thanks for the tip, Soraya!

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The trashtastic journey

Saturday, October 1, 2011 by

Remember that high tech tagging project to map waste streams called Trash Track? Well, this morning via Visible Trash, I discovered that they now have an amazing intro video featuring the award-winning data visualization to come out of the project.

Science follows art. Part of what I love about this project is that it reminds me of tagging butterflies, something my kindergarten class once did. We pressed tiny number stickers to the wings of Monarchs in the hopes that researchers down in Mexico would spot them and write them down. I wonder if anyone is using electronic tags to create magical animated infographics of butterfly migration. I shall investigate.

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Where once was trash

Monday, September 26, 2011 by

Fresh Kills. First it was an estuary. Then it was a landfill. Now it’s a park with an active blog and a brand new app.

Freshkills Park +

Freshkills Park Blog announced today that smartphone users visiting the park may now enhance their visits with an augmented reality app.

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.

Pretty snazzy. Can’t wait to try it out!

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Green technology to save essential pesos

Saturday, September 10, 2011 by

Recycled plastic bottles, water and dash of chlorine bring light to dark shacks outside Manila.

via HipUrbanGreen and Recyclart on Twitter

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Low Waste Wedding

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 by

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!

xoxo

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Al Frank upcycles

Monday, September 5, 2011 by

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!

 

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Mundano

Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by

Wooster Collective posted this Familia Gangsters video yesterday. It features the work of graffiti artist Mundano who uses the wagons of cartadores (pickers of recyclable materials) as canvases for his political murals.

For a closer look at this ongoing series, check out this flickr album.

And if you haven’t yet, please immediately buy, rent or stream the documentary Waste Land. It chronicles another trash-themed Brazilian art project in which photographer Vik Muniz enlisted cartadores to help create massive portraits of themselves using recyclables picked from a gigantic dump, then sold prints to profit their workers’ collective.

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#Less365

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 by

A minimalist post for a minimalist concept: click here for details then follow #Less365 on Twitter.

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Mill City Farmer’s Market

Monday, August 22, 2011 by

I’m in Minneapolis for the weekend visiting my mom. The weather is perfect and we’ve been biking a lot. We usually go to the big farmer’s market, which is one of my favorite open air markets in the whole world. This time, though, we popped just over the river from my mom’s place to the Mill City Farmer’s Market tucked adorably between the Mill City Museum and the new Guthrie Theater.  Minneapolis recently licensed food trucks, so like many other places across the country, street food is all the rage here. We ate some yummy tacos before browsing the Hmong vegetable stalls, Nepali momo stand, Iranian gourmet chocolate table, the cute sundress shop and all kinds of other delectable vendor offerings.

Best eggplant ever

There was some live music playing and people were out in droves, sitting on the Guthrie steps to eat and listen and milling about the market. When my mom and I were done with our tacos (and, later, some ginger sorbet) we tossed our disposable packaging and utensils into one of the large compost bins prominently on display and STAFFED by local volunteers to help you decide what went into which bin.

Compost tutor

I couldn’t get over the staffed composting bins. Ours gave us a helpful lecture on why he felt composting was way better than recycling, stopping between impassioned sentences to direct the disposal of plates and cups. I love seeing the can labeled “trash” dwarfed in size compared to the other receptacles.

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The Palms

Saturday, August 13, 2011 by

Last night I went to the opening party for The Palms, a pop up urban beach club featuring dumpster pools in Long Island City. The art, music and concept are a collaboration between the NYC groups behind many of the city’s most interesting semi-secret and heavily themed events. Despite the recent disillusioning discovery that dumpster pools are all made from newly constructed containers that have never held trash, I was psyched to check out the scene. I mean, just look at the teaser video, wouldn’t you be?

While it was cool to see the pools up close, they were built tastefully into a deck off to the side and overall, as an evening event, the party fell a bit flat for me. Paris Metro gawking rules applied, but I didn’t see too much worth staring at. One or two bold ladies danced in bikinis. Hipsters played what my friend Oriana of Brooklyn Spaces called “a vicious game of chicken” in the water. An obligatory gourmet food truck sold fancy fast food. The limited bar list included PBR and soju cocktails. House music pulsed, a lone breaker busted some moves. Maybe we got there too early. I just never forgot I was standing in a mostly empty parking lot in Queens. I think I would have been more excited if the pools were in the center of the space and distributed in a way that forced me to walk around them.

Anyway, in this final weeks of summer, I definitely see the appeal of just such a chic destination down the street from PS1. From what I understand the organizers plan to host semi regular daytime events until Labor Day. Local trashies, let me know if any of you go check out the joint for yourselves.

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Posted in Artistic Trash | 6 Comments »

WasteLandscape

Thursday, August 4, 2011 by

My favorite thing about this installation art project up now in Paris and beautifully documented over at inhabitat is the adorable typo in this video.

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Recovering plunderer

Thursday, August 4, 2011 by

Streaming TED talks is a dangerous habit. It’s so hard to watch just one. This morning, via the TED Blog, I discovered this great presentation by Ellen Gustafson, founder of something called The 30 Project that looks at how food systems have changed since 1980 and tries to undo some of the damage.

Maybe because it’s Ramadan—a time of year when many of us across the planet are extra attuned to issues of hunger and poverty—I found her talk to be extremely compelling. In particular, she makes great links between the underlying causes of hunger and obesity and pokes holes in oversimplified responses that aim to feed the hungry.

Anyway, with the exception of critiquing canned food and canned food drives, Gustafson doesn’t get much into issues of waste and recycling. So, of course, I had to go rooting through TED vaults where I came across this talk by legendary Ray “the green CEO” Anderson. I am always skeptical of businessmen hawking good causes. And Anderson, like any other CEO has an incentive to promote his company’s public image. But I am consistently absorbed when I see clips of this guy and his near-religious passion for treading lightly.

I’ll admit, I zoned out a bit when he got too into his own math equations, but tuned right back in when he defined affluence as a means to an end, rather than the goal in and of itself. Simple, but critical framing. We don’t amass stuff just to have stuff, we do it because we think it will make us happy. See what you think.

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Ecology is the new opiate of the masses

Monday, August 1, 2011 by

The sometimes kooky and always entertaining philospoher Slavoj Žižek offered these thoughts on humans and our evolving relationship with trash and nature for the documentary Examined Life.

My favorite line: “No! You call this porn?”

If you haven’t seen it, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is an excellent rental choice.

Thanks for the tip, Tony Do!

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