Craftcycle is a blog documenting the life of trash, life with trash, and trsh life-style. Craftcycle is equal parts art, humor, documentary, and free-thinking. Welcome - and enjoy!
Great looking announcement that was passed along today. The sponsors, PBS and the creators of the television show Design Squad, are looking for some sport. Hook up with some yung’uns and pitch in - looks like fun!
While I was in Ithaca last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Victoria Romanoff, restorationist and artist. One of the pieces of ‘functional salvage art’ she introduced me to was her “washboard table.” The idea is elegantly simple: for an open-faced (front and back) table, join two antique washboards together with a top surface and an interior-mounted lower shelf. For a closed-back table, join three washboards together.
I had fun over the weekend creating some collage-texture work and joining them together as a side table. To give the top a nice clean edge, I trimmed the lip all the way around at 45 degrees. A coat of waterbased finish later, voila! A bright, colorful and very stable but lightweight table.
Next time, I’ll have to make sure I find matching washboards to match: I was so excited to get started on this effort that I’ve used a bronze, horizontally oriented board on one side, and a plated silver, vertically oriented board on the other. Both made by National Corporation of Chicago and bought locally for about $4.00.
The Huffington Post, perhaps coming off a toxin-free Earth Day ‘08 celebration, runs a story on “dumpster diving” first thing Monday morning. Wow - cognitive dissonance on one cup of coffee. Here’s an excerpt:
Though I have never riffled through the trash myself, I must admit to having tremendous respect for those who do. “Dumpster diving,” aka urban foraging, skally-wagging, garbage picking, binning, skip-raiding, skip-weaseling or trashing is an eco-excellent way to cut back on today’s excessive landfill waste, pollution and rampant squandering of non-renewable resources. Think about it! By salvaging that which is still usable, garbage scavengers, or divers as they’re commonly referred, lower landfill levels while preventing the energy-sipping manufacture of resource-robbing objects.
Sounds as if, in the best traditions of lefty journalism, our intrepid reporter got ‘down and dirty’ with the natives, even picking up some hip new lingo. Hm, maybe someday artwork made by these new heroes of the intelligencia will find their way into their parlours too. Well, I guess I’m glad for the coverage. Want more? Go ahead and ’skip-weasel’ your way over to the HuffPost…
While in New York recently for a “Greening the Arts” syposium, I had the very good fortune to meet an artist, preservationist, and self-described “recycling fanatic” Victoria Romanoff. Touring her converted firestation - which serves as her home, studio, and office - I was struck by how full and well-lived her life is, which is so richly conveyed in everything that Victoria produces. She has this eye for the scuffle, bumps, and scrapes of life that are bound up in a scrap of wood or painted façade alike.
A show curated by Ms Romanoff was recently brought down at the Thomkins County Public Library - I wish I’d been there in time to see it! Nonetheless, I was able to get a sense of the materials - principally wood and metal - that compose her works. More importantly I was introduced to the range of motifs captured in her dense works. I caught whiffs of the gothic, romantic and even baroque mustiness bound up in these very modern works (Constructivism meets Duchamp with a nod to Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’?).
Just about all of her materials are found at historic preservation sites and dumps, which she gives new life through spontaneous composition, clever joinery, and uniform coating treatments. Another interesting aspect of Ms Romanoff’s work is that is serves equally well as functional and decorative works.
One disappointment: there’s not alot of her work online. You’ll have to meet her yourself and seek out every opportunity you can to find her works on view!
In Ann Arbor, Michigan there’s a little shop doing its part to keep waste out of the waste stream. The Scrap Box, a community-based non-profit organization, is a massive 9,000 square foot space that, in addition to cleverly sorting and selling a wide range of crafty materials, hosts a gallery and workshop space. Their wesbite has some fun project ideas as well, many of them captured in nice little “how to” videos.”
From their site, “The Scrap Box is the place for creative recycling. You will find a large assortment of unique materials which manufacturers and businesses would otherwise send to landfills: remnants, samples, seconds, and scraps. This good “junk” can be recycled into useful materials for art classes, learning games, science experiments, crafts and other expressions of creativity. The Scrap Box is open to the public.
To have us relay your answers to Mayor Bloomb
Here is a good piece of video reporting from Kenya by Al Jazeera, the global news network. It follows an earlier report from Reuters about the same dump.
[Reposted from UNICEF] Angélica is a 10-year-old girl whose unemployed parents left the countryside five years ago to go to the city of Olinda in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco.
Circumstances forced the family to the garbage dump of Olinda, where they constructed a home from pieces of cardboard and plastic. It is there amongst the food and trash unwanted by others that Angélica and her two younger sisters have lived, played and worked. Thanks to a local effort which is part of a year-old national campaign called “Children in the Garbage Dumps: Never Again,” Angelica is going to school and her little sisters are attending a creche.
For most people in developed economies, the image of 45,000 children living and working in garbage dumps is almost impossible to visualize. In most rich countries, there is a healthy and sustainable treatment of solid waste and child labour does not exist. In Brazil, healthy and sustainable treatment of solid waste is a relatively new and very complicated issue. Part of the issue is the dependence by many poor families on the collection and sale of recyclable trash for their survival.
Thousands of young children and adolescents were found four years ago to be working in garbage areas in 1,956 of the country’s 5,507 municipalities. They do this to contribute to their families’ meager income. Solutions to this problem must thus include finding viable alternatives for these children and their families, and changing the attitudes of people in the communities in which they live and work.
On November 19th the documentary film “Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home” will premier in Toronto and on screen in homes across the globe. Garbage! documents, over the course of six months, how households contribute to environmental problems including water pollution, air pollution, soil pollution and marine pollution. From the film-makers Facebook group:
Concerned for the future of his new baby boy Sebastian, writer director Andrew Nisker takes an average urban family, the McDonalds, and asks them to keep every scrap of garbage that they create for three months. He then takes them on a journey to find out where it all goes and what it’s doing to the world.
From organic waste to the stuff they flush down the potty, the plastic bags they use to the water they drink out of bottles, the air pollution they create when transporting the kids around, to using lights at Christmas, the McDonalds discover that for every action there is a reaction that affects them and the entire planet.
Everyday life under a microscope has never been so revealing. By the end of this trashy odyssey, you are truly inspired to revolutionize your lifestyle for the sake of future generations.
Learn more - and be a part of the Garbage! revolution.
By Andrew Cawthorne and Jeremy Clarke
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Willis Ochieng, 10, scavenges through smoking refuse piled as high as a house at one of Africa’s biggest rubbish mountains, his friends sitting nearby sucking on dirty plastic bottles of noxious yellow glue.
Located near slums in the east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, the open dump receives some 2,000 tons of garbage daily. A U.N. study published on Friday says it is seriously harming the health of children and polluting the city.
“I have been coming here with my friends since I was eight,” Willis told Reuters. “We come every day from the morning to the night. We come for plastic bags, anything metal we can sell.”
As he spoke, maribu storks circled amid hundreds of red and green plastic bags blown by the breeze over the 30-acre Dandora site. At his feet, rats picked through the fetid, stinking heap.
“I want to go to school but I need money to buy food and help my mother,” said the boy, dressed in a ragged grey T-shirt and shorts.
Friday’s study, commissioned by the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), found that half of 328 children tested round the site had lead concentrations in their blood exceeding the internationally
accepted level.
While hundreds of residents in the area rely on scavenging for income, it is mainly children who wade through the dump.
Exposed to pollutants from heavy metals and toxins in the site’s soil, water and air, almost half the youths tested suffered from respiratory diseases including chronic bronchitis and asthma, UNEP said.
Nearly half the soil samples from the area had lead levels almost 10 times higher than unpolluted samples.
“The Dandora site may pose some special challenges for the city of Nairobi and Kenya as a nation. But it is also a mirror to the condition of rubbish sites across many parts of Africa and other urban centers of the developing world,” said UNEP head Achim Steiner, exhorting city leaders to remedy the situation.
