Feature: One man's trash sparks another's creativity

By Hannah Hayes

Published Sept. 26, 2006

As foxes crawled out of wallpaper heaps and flowers grew from plastic soda can rings, Christine Gardener looked on while children donned newspaper hats and turned trash into treasures at the Columbia Festival of the Arts' Recyclebration.

"My favorite part is watching how absorbed people get in this," said Gardener, a recycling program assistant at Columbia's Public Works Department.

"Parents will start watching what their kids are making, and pretty soon they're sitting down making something too."

For 10 years, Recyclebration, in conjunction with the festival, has taught the public about creative ways it can reduce and reuse waste. With a pick-up-truck load of garbage spread over craft tables, children and adults made mobiles with CDs, origami out of discarded wallpaper books and envelopes with outdated calendar pages. Spray paint from discarded paint cans turned six-pack soda rings and wire into flowers.

"People always say that they can do this at home after they do it. You can take a calendar from 1993 and make something useful from it," Gardener said.

Alex McCall, 13, came with his neighbor Kim Freese, an art teacher for Columbia Public Schools.

"I take wires from around my house and make things," Alex said, helping a girl fold wallpaper samples. "I took some lamp parts and wires, and I made an antenna once."

But behind grade-schoolers armed with glue and inspiration, there is a lesson that college students can learn: Many items can be reused creatively. All it takes is vision. Gardener suggests getting the most out of basic school supplies.

"If students did one thing it should be to use both sides of a piece of paper," she said. "In a lifetime, there would be this huge mountain of imaginary paper that you didn't waste."

MU groups such as Sustain Mizzou also teach students about the benefits of sustainable living. For example, they create notebooks that feature covers made from cereal boxes and notebook paper that has only been used on one side.

Although Recyclebration aims to show the public how to reduce its trash output, Gardner said she believes that the event also helps reintroduce an instinct that has been lost in our ready-to-use, throwaway culture.

"We have such a deep urge to create things," she said, while kids behind her threaded raffia through CDs, making mobiles. "We just let people use their imaginations."