点废成绿 Greening the Beige (GtB) is an eco-minded arts collective and not-for-profit community network dedicated to nurturing awareness of environmental issues. 点废成绿 GtB promotes and celebrates earth friendly artists and organizations in Beijing.
"Why are we being forced to choose between the economy and the environment? We tend to forget that without an environment we would not have an economy, as everything we consume and I mean everything comes from our environment."
~ Franke James (contemporary artist, photographer, writer)
Beijing's landfills are getting full fast! Reduce the "trash" you throw away by purchasing products with minimal packaging. Look for reusable, recyclable, and biodegrable items and remember to carry your reusable shopping bags!
In advocacy of creative green spirit, GtB will make a new version of its eco-artastic Garbage Cube for this year's Roots and Shoots Annual Summit.
Initially, we came up with some excellent ideas, such as using a giant paper box to build a garbage "mountain" and placing garbage monsters on it. However, this plan was limited because of the lack of materials - Jessica and Devin had been to many places that may have these cardboard boxes, but none of them offered to donate materials.
Another idea was to use metal tubes to create a cuboid exhibition space. However,considering it's a closed space, the impact probably wouldn't be as good as constructing an open space. We eventually passed these two ideas.
So, Devin suggested rebuilding the old Garbage Cube to show the relationship between waste management and reducing your carbon footprint.
The original cube demonstrated the volume of CO2 produced by the average person in China every 11 hours (2 meters x 2 meters x 2 meters). Reducing the volume of household trash by 1 kilogram daily could help cut carbon emissions by 2.06 kg per day – with China’s 370 million households combined, that’s a savings of 762.2 million kg of carbon emissions daily.
In other words, The Garbage Cube demonstrates that if waste is sorted, separated, recycled and reduced, significantly less amounts of CO2 will be released into the atmosphere.
We decided to keep this demonstration. Li Yu even came up with an advanced idea - use ropes to hang little colored paper boxes (which are easy to find) onto the metal frame and put garbage monsters inside them. Visitors can experience the cube and use handy recycling materials to make a garbage monster on their own! The whole project will look not only attractive and beautiful, but will also be educational.
I've announced this project at the last Beijing Green Drinks and invited everyone to join us. All are welcome to visit and make a garbage monster on Sep. 24th at the National Zoological Museum (please click here for more details)!
Green Cheers,
Mia
