One person's trash is another person's...treasure?
Art imitates life; life imitates art.
This has become quite the cliché, but it stands true. Art has always been a commentary on the social order by either calling to action or eliciting a reaction to a specific piece or a body of work. With the modernization of art, artists have been given a larger venue to express their philosophies leaving more room for interpretation to those that interact with their work.
When I saw the Waste Not installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, my interpretation required a call for action and the SYR blog is my soapbox.
Song Dong’s display features every single item his mother had saved and collected over the course of her life. The magnitude of belongings is due to the fact that she followed the Chinese dictum wu jin qi yong meaning waste not. This ideology suggests that a person should use every last drop of every single resource in their possession: Every bottle should be saved, every piece of material, every bowl, every wire (etc…).
Although I’ve provided you with some photographs, I was going to post a video of the exhibit so you could see the magnitude of stuff this woman collected. Sadly, the security guard caught me filming—let’s just say you’re lucky I lived to write this post.
Keeping every single item you ever use may not be the most practical thing to do but there are some ways we could be smarter about using what we have to waste less in the future.
Did you know that Canadians produce 1.7kg of waste each everyday (roughly our body weight in garbage every single month!) or that Canadians take home more than 55 million plastic shopping bags each week, or almost eight million every day?
That’s a lot of garbage! [For more waste-related facts, click here.]
So we’re making a huge mess of the environment but there are ways of reducing waste and increasing the reusability of certain items.
Recycling for one can eliminate a large chunk of litter. Some cities also have a green box where food and paper towel and other organic materials. Having both bins at my house has reduced the usual garbage bag to a small plastic bag. Hooray!
Another tip from Ms. Obvious is to bring your own bag when grocery shopping. You can fit more in a big canvas bag anyways and you avoid awkward bag breaking incidents.
Here are ways to stay green in the office and here is a really awesome breakdown of why we recycle and how it’s done.
Beyond environment-saving, wasting less can also save you money. With all of the paper you would normally throw away, create a note pad, and Instead of letting a restaurant trash your leftovers, pack them up and eat them the next day. Two meals for the price of one!
Old clothes you don’t want? go to a clothing swap or give them to a clothing drive!
…and the list goes on. Do you have any waste-reducing tips???
Happy non-wasting!
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Tags: Art, MoMa, New York, Recession, Recycling, Romi Levine, Screw You Recession, Song Dong, waste, Waste Not
