After the invention of the electric guitar in the 1940s and the skateboard in the 1950s, it was simply inevitable that somebody would combine the two classic instruments of shredding. Now Buenos Aires based duo, Ezequiel Galasso and Gianfranco de Gennaro have created Skate Guitar – a project which recycles old skate decks into something ready to soar again… at least in a musical sense. [Read more...]
Michael Johansson often thinks of his work as real-life Tetris. He works with discarded objects collected methodically from yard sales, flea markets… wherever people are getting rid of their “junk.” It’s the kind of work a hoarder might build if they arranged their object obsessed lives in productive, color and shape coordinated fashion. [Read more...]
Botafogo Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has been taken over by two huge fish leaping from the sand and entertaining beach goers with their nightly illumination and unique construction. Each fish was built using hundreds of recycled plastic bottles to bring attention to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as the Rio+20. [Read more...]
The answer to the question above is for most a resounding “NO”… but for the US’s bloated medical industry, this is not the case. Many products that have no logical explanation for an expiration date, including wooden tongue depressors, are thrown away every year. Often these products are in dire need in other countries… so it is no wonder why our country has the highest cost per patient for healthcare of any country in the world. The unfortunate truth is that it is illegal here to repurpose medical products, even if they have not been used. Worse yet, these products end up in landfills only polluting the world more. Now, an organization called MedWish has set out to find a solution to this problem [Read more...]
Be it beans, granola or sometimes even tomatoes, it seems today that everything we eat is somehow wrapped in colorful packaging. In fact, packaging makes up 40 percent of municipal waste in the U.S alone. Now, In.gredients a grocery store opening in Austin, Texas is hoping to fix that problem by creating the country’s first packaging-free, zero-waste grocery store. By eliminating all packaging from their products In.gredients is hoping to create a waste-free model to follow and make a significant dent in the mountain of garbage created daily. [Read more...]
Cleverly returning a hint of their paper based origins, artist Kylie Stillman takes old discarded books and carefully carves inverted bonzai tree reliefs in their pages. Her works come at a time when book art and carving are gaining in popularity, yet her works stand out as unique examples in the young trend. The Australian artist got her start at carving books in 2006 when she trimmed a bird into a discarded tome; she later gave her birds a place to sit, progressing to potted plants and now her current tree carvings. For her latest work featuring trees carved in stacks of boldly colored paper, see her website kyliestillman.com. [Read more...]
Here’s a great way to reuse that stack of old e-waste you have floating around the house: the people over at VIST, a Ukrainian IT and computer service, are making toys out of only old hard drive parts. Creatively using the existing shapes and structures of the drives, they’ve made both a futuristic race car and a kiwi like robot bird.
To show you how they get the job done we’ve also included some pictures of their crew… hard at work dissasembling old computer parts for future projects.
Putting the cycle back in recycle, some clever Aussies in Sydney built a huge Christmas tree completely out of old bicycles. For the third year running, the people at The Rocks have built their tree completely out of reused objects. In 2008 the tree was built out of discarded wooden chairs and in 2009 it was made entirely of plastic bottles. This year they really raised the bar and used 100 old two-wheelers painted green, radially mounted with multi-colored lights to illuminate.
This year’s bicycle tree:
[Read more...]
Taking normal household trash that would most likely be headed for the landfill, artist Zac Freeman uses a decade’s worth of collected junk to create amazingly realistic portraits. With his ‘paint’ being buttons, small toys, old film canisters, Legos and much more, he carefully arranges these small bits and bobs and applies them to wooden substrate with glue. Faces literally jump off the page with intense depth and texture, so that when seen from a distance, they smooth into an organized, lifelike whole.
For more on Zac Freeman, be sure to check out his website zacfreemanart.com [Read more...]
