A french supermarket chain fights food waste and sees an increase in sales as a result. Hypercool!
Posts Tagged ‘France’
Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables
Sunday, August 24, 2014Dirty Bees
Friday, October 5, 2012Inhabitat posted an amusing story today about honey in northeastern France mysteriously coming out green and blue. Turns out the bees over there have been feasting on waste from a nearby M&M’s factory, thus tinting their sweet byproduct.
Photo credit: Joelk75
And if still images aren’t enough, voici un vidéo. You really get a sense of the magnitude of the issue in motion picture.
This story cracks me up and reminds me of the similar mystery that plagued South Brooklyn a couple years ago, when it turned out our local bees were gorging on waste from a maraschino cherry factory in Red Hook.
Photo credit: Susan Dominus via the New York Times
Gross. Still more gross are the hits one gets when doing an Internet search for “contaminated honey.” More to come.
Arman’s poubelles
Sunday, April 25, 2010French artist Arman traveled between France and the US making incredible trash art for several decades before his death in 2005. A recurring theme in his work was the poubelle, or trash can.
Household trash in a glass box, 1959
Here’s a photo timeline of Arman’s poubelles, a must-click for anyone interested in trash art. A biography of the artist can be found here (check out the photo of his piece “Long Term Parking”) and a more general timeline of his life and work here. Thanks Rachel and Tamar for sharing these links. Super!
The Beaches of Agnès
Wednesday, July 1, 2009Agnès Varda, director of the amazing documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), has a new film out—what appears to be a fantastical, memoir-documentary about her life as a New Wave pioneer, wife and lover of Jacques Demy and all-around badass. Here’s the trailor.
And here’s A.O. Scott‘s piece on the project and its creator. In it, he calls Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse “a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over.” And it is. Because Varda made it. In France. If anyone else had tackled the project, it would have been a movie about freegans and politics and all that is wonky and dull and without the fun of a wacky French/Belgian woman inserting herself into the action as a very present narrator. In short, it would have been no fun at all and noone would remember that in France, they have a crazy law that requires farmers to open their farms up to the public after harvest to collect leftover food. I can’t wait to see what the rest of her life/career was like.
Anyway, since this post is only tangentially trash-related, I’m throwing in this link from a few months back on urban gleaning. Check it out now if you missed it then.
Weekly Compactor
Friday, June 19, 2009This week in trash news:
- A trash bag kills whales off the coast of South Carolina;
- Also in South Carolina, the unemployed find temp work cleaning up nuclear waste;
- We are reminded that garbage soup swirls in the Atlantic ocean, too;
- Vermonters recycle a restaurant;
- Frenchies produce an average of 7 tons of trash per person per year; and
- The UK explores the power of poo.
Late breaking dumpsters
Monday, May 11, 2009You know why I loved Decorative Dumpster Day? Because it gave me a festive sense of community and solidarity among garbloggers.Thanks again to all who participated in this international extravaganza. And start collecting decorative dumpster images for next year!
For those who missed the first annual adventure in group blogging about trash receptacles, here’s the roundup. Co-organizer and DDD logo designer Little Shiva was traveling and without solid internet connection on May 1, here’s her late breaking submission à la française.
Be sure to also check out MS the Younger‘s 3-part entry on the lack of decorated dumpsters in Japan at MadSilence here, here and here.
everydaytrash 