A masterpiece from the trash heap: enthusiasts turn trash into works of art

For more than a quarter of a century, November 15 has been celebrated as World Recycling Day. This environmental “red date” is intended to draw attention to the problem of the most efficient disposal of garbage and waste. As we found out, some “creatives” approached solving such issues in very original ways.

Environmentalists, inventors, scientists, heads of government agencies are struggling with the problem of combating the littering of our planet… And also individual enthusiasts who are ready to prove by their own example that waste can be used to make various useful things.

Here we will mention only a few unusual “junk” projects.

Six years ago, one of the residents of the American state of California distinguished himself with his constructive approach to the most seemingly “hopeless” garbage. Apparently, this young man was very irritated by the habit of his fellow citizens to scatter leftover tobacco products everywhere. So one day he decided to use them as material to create… sports equipment. Having called several friends for help, the guy began collecting cigarette butts in city parking lots, beaches, roadsides… Having eventually accumulated a sufficient amount of “raw materials,” the enthusiast made a surfboard from half-smoked cigarettes using glue. According to his calculations, it took about 10 thousand cigarette butts to create it.

Artur Bordalo, a master of street art from Portugal, has created a whole gallery of giant installations, decorating city squares, building walls and fences with them. The artist collected bas-reliefs and three-dimensional sculptures depicting birds, animals, and insects. At the same time, as material for creativity, he used fragments of metal structures, used door panels, plastic and metal fragments of automobile bodies… At the final stage of the work, the finished composition was painted in bright colors using aerosol cans.

And the Palestinian fisherman Muath Abu Zeid was preoccupied with a purely utilitarian task – building a suitable boat for the marine fishery, which has to earn a living. Having collected about 700 empty plastic bottles from garbage dumps, Abu Zeid managed to assemble them into a watercraft for himself, vaguely resembling a boat. On this original “boat,” the components of which were fastened together with scraps of nets (also picked up from heaps of garbage), he ventured to go fishing hundreds of meters from the shore.

About half a century ago, activists from one of the environmental organizations proposed building houses from discarded car tires. Each such “building block” must first be filled inside with earth, after which the tires are laid in a checkerboard pattern, forming walls of any configuration conceived by the builder. The remaining gaps and recesses between them should be filled with a mortar prepared from cement and sand. The resulting design, according to the inventors, has excellent heat and sound insulation properties.

In terms of the original use of waste materials, their Russian colleagues do not lag behind foreign enthusiasts.

In the Moscow region, for example, several houses were built from glass containers.

Apparently, aircraft designer and tester Alexey Pietsukh became a pioneer in this field. In the early 1970s, he built an unusual “palace” made of empty bottles on his summer cottage near Iksha. Each piece of glass, picked up from a trash heap in holiday villages and boarding houses, replaced a brick. So Pietsukh was able to significantly save on the cost of building materials.

The inventive summer resident developed a simple construction technology: he laid a thick layer of cement mortar, and pressed the bottles into it in a neat row, one by one, with the bottoms facing out. There was more solution on top, a new row of bottles in it… So, layer by layer, Pietsukh raised the first floor, the second, and pulled up the sharp pediment. Moreover, in the center of it he even managed to lay out a bas-relief of a flying seagull from bottles of lighter glass. According to Alexey Ivanovich’s calculations, which he shared with an inquisitive journalist, about one and a half hundred “bricks with a neck” were needed per square meter of a solid wall.

Alas, the miracle dacha has not survived to this day. After the death of the veteran, the new owners of the site chose to build a house from traditional materials instead of the “glass” one. However, Pietsukh found followers. On trips around the Moscow region, the author of these lines had the opportunity to see several country houses and dachas, in which individual fragments of facades, or even entire floors, were made of bottles.

Muscovite Viktor Rakcheev became the author of another “garbage” know-how. This pensioner figured out how to make a transforming carpet from fragments of discarded plastic containers. The secret of such interior decoration can only be unraveled at close range: the intricate carpet patterns are formed by multi-colored bottle caps.

As the author of the invention explained, he assembled the frame of the carpet from the cut off necks of plastic bottles, which are found in abundance in every trash heap. It is very convenient to connect them by welding with a soldering iron. Using this method of “carpet weaving,” Rakcheev made a base frame measuring 220×220 centimeters. For this he needed about 4.5 thousand bottles.

And then everything is very simple. Having collected a lot of multi-colored caps from garbage, the inventor began to screw them onto the neck-cells in a certain order – to get the intended pattern.

Unlike ordinary carpets, this “bottle” carpet can be easily “renovated”: simply move the caps to other places and thus create a different pattern.

By the way, after some time the MK correspondent had a chance to make sure that Rakcheev was not alone in his “cover” business. Driving through one of the villages in the north of the Moscow region, I saw a fence decorated with some unusual multi-colored patterns. Upon closer examination, it turned out that they were formed by the same caps from plastic bottles. Only in this case, these round pieces are secured to the picket fence with nails.