Swap-o-matic is a vending machine that doesn’t use money. Instead, you swap something you have for something you want! It’s also an art project that makes a statement about consumption and recycling, designed by Lina Fenequito with Rick Cassidy and Ray Mancini. It’s a cool idea, but where I live, it would either stay empty or would become filled with old tires and obsolete electronics -things you have to pay to get rid of. Link -via Laughing Squid

What happened when you toss a hopelessly tangled string of Christmas tree lights to the recycling bin?

Chances are, if it escapes being put in a landfill, it will end up in Shijao, China, where 20 million pounds of Christmas lights go to die every year:

Shijiao, like most of China's recycling zones, began to thrive 20 years ago in part because of its cheap labor and low environmental standards. Even two years ago, visitors to the fields around town would see clouds of black smoke churning off giant piles of burning wire (not just Christmas tree wire), the fastest -- though by no means the cleanest -- way to extract copper from plastic and rubber. But something interesting happened on the road to globalization: China's manufacturers, hungry for cheap raw materials, developed an appetite for the recovered insulation that wraps around insulated copper wire, and devised a way to make into a range of products including, Li tells me, slipper soles.

Lithuanian artist Jolanta Smidtiene designed this 42-foot-tall Christmas tree made of 32,000 plastic beverage bottles. It’s displayed in the town square in Kaunas, Lithuania. See more pictures at Laughing Squid. Link

Link to Lithuanian source.

Most old tires end up in landfills, but these amazing artists, philanthropists and creators have gone out of their way to ensure that these old tires are turned into something better. WebEcoist has 25 cool items made from these useful, but no longer needed car accessories.

Link

There are no landfills for garbage in Antarctica, at least none near McMurdo Station, the American research outpost. Therefore, recycling is a serious endeavor, with a very extensive list of items to be recycled. Still, the residents have a sense of humor and added some “extra” bins for even more stuff to be recycled! See more at Boing Boing. Link

(Image credit: Henry Kaiser)

Take a trip back with this fun PopSci archive gallery of ways to reuse household items and see if you can’t find a way to spruce up your boring old house, or an idea for a fun christmas gift made from your leftover stuff. The kid in the drawing sure looks happy with his abacus made from thread spools, so this article may bring happiness into your life!

Link

Re

These beautiful “wastlandscapes” are made of 65,000 discarded CD’s. This 500 square meter installation is currently at Paris’s Centquatre museum and were hand sewn together. Ultimately, they will be broken down and recycled. I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking of stapling these to my trailer and fancying up my digs.  Yeah. Then it could be seen from space.

Link

If you’re the type of person who routinely wraps presents in the funny pages, then you’ll be as thrilled about this as I am. Wrap magazine is so graphically beautiful that you can literally use it to wrap gifts in when you’re done reading its pages. It’s the first magazine intended to be reused in such a way and it’s genius for a couple of reasons – the recycling aspect, obviously, but because it’s a magazine about illustration, it’s also giving the contributing artists extra exposure. So smart. The back cover is even perforated so you can split them out into eight note cards.

Link via Design*Sponge

Now here’s a place Homer Simpson could really worship, the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew Temple in Thailand. It’s made from over 1.5 million green Heineken and brown Chang beer bottles.

Link

Wouldn’t it be neat if you took a drawer from each piece of furniture your kid had as they grew up and made one big piece of furniture out of it?

Entwurf-Direkt is a cooperative store in Hamburg, Germany that functions as an art space and workshop all in one. It also serves to educate anyone who would like to do more with the furniture they have, thus doing their bit to help the environment. Their most recent project is the 1,000 Orphan Drawers which takes unused mismatched dresser drawers and outfits them with a new dresser in a unique shape. The design is to help encourage people to reuse what’s available to them in a out-of-the-dresser sort of way. Link -via Craftzine

Fate threw them together. He was 2%, she was whole. This video was commissioned by Friends of the Earth, a UK organization pushing for more recycling. Link -via Laughing Squid

Old tires are used for backyard swings and shredded for playground mulch, but that’s only the beginning of ways to use tires that are no longer road-worthy. This garden house was covered with tire treads to make it weatherproof. See more imaginative ways to reuse rubber at Killer Web Directory. Link

(Image source: Millegomme)

Artist Tanya Clarke takes old plumbing fixtures and turns them into light installations! The “drips” are hand-sculpted glass containing energy-efficient LEDs. Link | Product Site -via Dark Roasted Blend

Before I get started, I want to give a special thank you to WebEcoist and WebUrbanist, who provided a wealth of inspiration and research to this article.

Buildings

Starting on the big scale uses for leftover books, you can build entire structures with them. While Slovakian artist Matej Krén’s building inside The Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (above) may not be structurally sound enough to exist outside another building, the Yellow Pages building (below) might be able to hold its own in a storm. Students from the Dalhousie University Department of Architecture in Nova Scotia built the house using a few wooden and metal beams to hold the thick books in place.

Of course, even if a book building could survive the elements, it would soon become subject to destruction via mold and insects.

Home Insulation

Just because your home can’t be made completely from books doesn’t mean they can’t improve your home though. According to Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller magazine, books are an excellent form of insulation, so even if you don’t want to read certain titles any more, they still can be useful for filling up bookshelves that line the exterior-facing walls of your home.

Bookshelves

Artist Jim Rosenau specializes in making bookshelves and book cases from old books. Why bother chopping down trees to make wood for these book holders when you already have all the materials you need in your pile of books to get rid of?

Desks

If you have a lot of books and need a desk, you’re in luck. All it takes to turn a bunch of books into desk is a nice heavy slab of wood or glass in order to press down on the volumes and give you a smooth writing surface. Both the Brunswick Bound bookstore of Melbourne (above) and the library at the Delft University of Technology (below) are equipped with these stylish and incredibly inexpensive desks.

A Couch

If you need a couch more than a desk, a lot of unwanted books and some tape can be used to make a couch that’s certain to get attention. While the idea comes from “Paper Man,” a Jeff Bridges movie where a frustrated writer uses unsold copies of his first book to create a new couch, the idea is entirely possible –the set designers used real books and packing tape to design the furniture.

A Chair

For something with a substantially smaller book investment, these paperback chairs by artist David Karoff are always a good option. He designed them for a Rhode Island bookstore called Myopic Books, so since they were made to be used by customers on a regular basis, they’re probably quite a bit more comfortable than the book couch.

Lights

“Light up your life with books” sounds like something you’d see on a cheesy library poster from the eighties, but in this case, it’s actually a decorating tip. While you can always buy a beautiful $550 book chandelier from artist Lucy Norman (above), it’s surprisingly easy to make your own less sophisticated model, like the one below, at home. All you need is a lamp shade, a lamp kit, a few hardcover books, a clamp and a drill. Shauna Smith Duty teaches you how in this article on Thrift Fun.

Ceiling Décor

While these books hanging from the ceiling may not provide any useful function, they do look really cool and will certainly make a home with really high ceilings feel a lot more personal and cozy. The original art installation is by Richard Wentworth, but if you wanted to adapt this to your own home, I’m sure some fishing line and a drill would be all you would need.

Christmas Tree

Why chop down a tree when you can make your own out of the same basic material? To be fair, most people couldn’t find enough green books to create a whole tree and even if they did, they might be disappointed with the lack of lighting and ornament options, but for the Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco, the tree was a perfect holiday decoration.

Image via Shawn Calhoun [Flickr]

Planters

One of the coolest things about using a book as a planter is the fact that you’re using something that was once a living plant to provide care for another plant. I wish I could tell you more about these cool planters, but the company that makes them, Gartenkultur, is Italian and their website doesn’t have an English language version. Using the Google translator though, I was able to discern that they use some kind of insulating materials to ensure the plant can be watered without ruining the book.

Vases

Similarly, these book vases by designer Laura Cahill can be filled with water because hidden inside each papery base is a test tube for water collection. Miss Cahill also makes a great lamp out of book pages and a fun stool out of hard covers.

Clothes

If you’re not interested in decorating your home with books, what about your body? This stunning ball gown by Ryan Novelline is comprised of the covers of discarded Golden Books.

Jewelry

If you need some jewelry to go along with your new Golden Books dress, Little Fly has just the thing –rings, necklaces and more made from the laminated pages of discarded books.

Kindle Case

Are you afraid people will make fun of you for owning a Kindle? Do you hang out in bad neighborhoods where it’s best to hide your valuable possessions? Either way, Etsy seller BustedTypewriter’s carved out book that works as a Kindle case might be just the solution you’ve been hoping for.

3D Artworks

These days, most people are willing to acknowledge that the best part of a Pulp Fiction novel is the cover. Artist Thomas Allen took this idea to a whole new level by cutting and folding these covers and then shooting the images with a shallow depth of field. The result is a fascinating narrative that is even more artistic and vivid than the original artists could have ever hoped for.

Cutout Arts

Brian Dettmer uses a similar medium as Thomas Allen. Only instead of photographing the covers of books that he has moved into position, he instead cuts away at pictures inside of books until the many layers of pages form an all new image. The results are amazingly detailed and strikingly beautiful.

Art Canvases

When most people see a book, they see a series of pages that form a story. Mike Stilkey sees a blank canvas. While he doesn’t exclusively paint on book covers, some of his most eye-catching artworks take advantage of the unique canvases. The only problem I see with the art is how you would take it down if it needed to go to a new museum or to a buyer’s home?

Of course, you can always give your books away to Good Will if you don’t have the motivation to tackle any of these projects yourself.

Have any of you ever used your books for non-literary purposes? If so, please share your stories in the comments.

Since so many people now carry phones, the public phone booth is going the way of the dinosaurs. What to do with all those old, outdated booths? Check out these ten ideas for new uses, including the phone booth shown that was turned into a handy public shower for use after swimming in the waters off the Virgin Islands. Link -Thanks, Ritu!

(Image credit: Flicker user anoldent)

Architects from the firm SHSH built a temporary pavilion building in Brussels from recycled material -30,000 beer crates! With lighting, the yellow crates give off a golden glow inside and out. See more pictures of this structure at The Design Blog. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

Retailer, Barney’s New York, has a foodie themed Christmas display this year. Miss Illy, the mannequin pictured above, wears a gown assembled from recycled  Illycafe espresso foil bags and tops off her look with an espresso machine hat. She is definitely the Queen of Caffeine! Barney’s creative director, Simon Doonan, used hundreds of crimped and pleated foil bags to create this masterpiece. 

Link

Got an odd glove? Make it into a cute little squirrel, with directions from Tokyo crafter Miyako Kanamori reprinted from her book Happy Gloves! Link -via Nag on the Lake

Instead of throwing your pumpkin away, fill it with bird seed and let it serve as a feeder for birds. When it starts to get soft then compost it or refill with seeds and throw it into the woods.

I normally just paint ours for Halloween, so I can cook it later. Link -via Buzzfeed

This is what I call taking recycling up a notch. Elis Stenman began covering his house with rolled up newspapers in 1922. He also covered the interior furnishings. By the time he was through he had used 100,000 newspapers. He varnished the surfaces to protect them from the elements and the structure has held up for 88 years. The article does not tell us whether newspapers provide effective insulation which was what Stenman was trying to determine when he began the project so many years ago.

Link – Via J-Walk

YouTube link.

“Filmed in the style of a nature documentary and narrated by Academy Award-winner Jeremy Irons, this “mockumentary”, though lighthearted in tone, hammers home the stark reality of California’s plastic bag pollution situation.”

The video was created to generate support for a bill before the California legislature which will ban single-use plastic bags, limit distribution of paper bags, and encourage the use of reusable bags.

More information is available at Heal the Bay.

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

You know those silica gel packs that are always in new shoe boxes and vitamin packets? Turns out there’s an amazing number of clever re-uses for them. Coolest one: Keep garden seeds fresh. Wildest one: Keep your gun collection moisture-free.

Silica gel is a desiccant, a substance that absorbs moisture. Despite its misleading name, the silicate is actually a very porous mineral with a natural attraction to water molecules. Manufacturers utilize the gel to keep goods from spoiling, molding or degrading due to humidity. The gel itself is nontoxic, but can have a moisture indicator added (cobalt chloride) which is a known toxin that turns pink when hydrated and is otherwise blue in its dry form.

Then I discovered several great suggestions for using these packs around the house and keeping them from the landfill just a wee bit longer.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Southern Hope.

This man has given up his job, family and possessions to build an island that floats on plastic bottles he’s found and used as buoys! Talk about recycling to good use!

Need ideas for some cool Father’s Day gift? Your old man would surely appreciate these: the Big Daddy Tumbler (from San Francisco’s Speakeasy Ales & Lagers brewery) and Dad’s Root Beer Tumbler, glasses made by the artisan company BottleHood by "upcycling" beer and soda bottles.

For more nifty Father’s Day gift ideas, check out the NeatoShop: Link

Primary school teacher Rachael originally had the white dress made for her by parents of pupils for a term time recyclable materials fashion show last month.

But when fiancé Duncan popped the question while on holiday in Canada days later, she knew exactly which dress she would be wearing for the official ceremony.

The dress is made from sheets of carefully stitched bubble wrap, attached to an inner cloth lining, and finished off with white foam packaging material and Haribo sweets.

The couple had a second, more traditional ceremony for the families back home in England. Link -via Unique Daily

Meet Gene Pool, an eco-activist who specializes in making wardrobe out of stuff that other people threw away. His crowning achievement is a wearable suit made from 500 aluminum cans; you’ll see why he’s called … The Can Man!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via EcoFriend

(Image by ngbiblog)

Recycling is a potent concept. Many regard it as simply the repurposing of objects in order to prevent waste, but in the right hands, it can be a process that charts all sorts of powerful aesthetic and cultural shifts. The “Throne of Weapons” and “Tree of Life” are two pieces of “recycling” that do just this. Made from decommissioned AK47s and other instruments of death from the Mozambique civil war, they take the physical remains of war and transform them into the collective hopes of a nation traumatized by violence and cruelty.

(Image via wikimedia, by drow male)

Both objects are the product of the imaginatively entitled “Transforming Arms into Tools” project. But despite its rather functional name, the scheme, set up in 1995 by the Christian Council of Mozambique, is consistently creating some of the most the most poignant “recycled” art in recent memory. These guns began life in the poisonous smelting factories of Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea or Portugal, before being put to bloody use in the dense jungles of Mozambique’s coastal lowlands. Now, under the initiative of Bishop Dinis Sengulane, they are crafted into icons that carry a nation’s hopes for peace.

(Image by hjallig)

Under the guidance of the Christian Council, teams from the project (known as Transformação de Armas em Enxadas, or TAE) cut up the guns and re-mould them into sculptures: an elaborate, if disturbing chair, and a tree dedicated to ‘life’. The chair alone is composed of guns that originated in seven different countries, pointing up the resolutely unresolved issue of international arms trade. The resulting artworks are not only hauntingly beautiful for the casual observer, but also draw together many intersecting currents for the people of Mozambique.

(Image by James M Thorne)

In one sense, we might think of them as cathartic: they perform a cleansing or purging movement, ridding us of painful emotional excess, not unlike the original intentions of Greek Tragedy. They give outer form to Mozambique’ s collective surplus of sorrow, left to stew long after the firing stopped, a form of relief that prevents such pain from eating its people up, or worse still, erupting into further violence. Conversely, they also enable us as viewers to experience their pain in a controlled form, fostering a sense of profound empathy for the victims of such a tragic conflict, perhaps an implicit form of advice that we should never let this happen again.

(Image by hdptcar)

At another level, they are also signs of peace that point the way to happier times. Just as these sculptures recycle guns that brought misery into art that brings pleasure, so they recycle the memories of those who perished, into a new feeling of humanity, brotherhood and charity. They serve as reminders of what came to pass, and of why we should strive to avoid human conflict in the future. In this sense they embody a change, and one for the good, that we hope is sweeping through the villages of Mozambique and other war-torn countries the world over.

(Image by rvacpinta)

The pieces were acquired by the British Museum in 2005 and spent the next few years touring the major cities of Britain, garnering huge applause. Now on display in the museum, they are definitely worth a trip to London we think; these moving sculptures may be recycled monuments to death, but crucially, also to life and a peaceful future.

Thanks to author Chris Ingham Brooke of Environmental Graffiti.

The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl’s raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.

The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.

The Plastiki was built on the San Francisco waterfront in 2009 and has been making trial voyages on the bay.

Link via The Presurfer | Official Website | Photo: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle

Sayaka Kajita Ganz makes sculptures from recycled materials, and here she’s made a dramatic pair of horses from black and white plastic objects.  The installation is called Emergence; you can guess which horse is Night and which is Wind.

My working process is reminiscent of my experiences growing up in several different countries, of being disconnected from the place I was born. Then, I began searching for a new community where I truly belong. I find discarded objects from peoples’ houses and give them a second life, a new home. For my sculptures I use plastic utensils, toys and metal pieces among other things. I only select objects that have been used and discarded. The human history behind these objects gives them life in my eyes.  My goal is for each object to transcend its origins by being integrated into an animal form that seems alive. This process of reclamation and regeneration is liberating to me as an artist.

Much more fantasticness at her site.

-via Design You Trust | Photo credit:Sayaka Kajita Ganz

What to get your beloved geek girlfriend? How about this Recycled Keyboard Purse, made from 365 computer keyboard keys. From the Neatorama Shop: Link

Or how about some Yummy Pocket Pizza, Taco, Cookie, or Pita?

The 2nd Annual Golden Gate Express Garden Railway is open at San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers. The garden features miniature versions of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, buildings, and of course, a train! Plus, they are all made of recycled materials. The exhibition is open until April 18th, but if you can’t go, you can see more pictures at Laughing Squid. Link

(image credit: Todd Lappin)

At first you think: it’s “free” and “this machine accepts all credit cards”, that’s not right. And then you think “Oh…” This clever recycling idea was submitted to There, I Fixed It. Link -via reddit

New Zealander Sandy Sanderson needed a new hobby to occupy his time as he recovered from a motorcycle accident, so he started making model cars from discarded aluminum cans. As you can see, he’s gotten very good at making what he calls CanCars. See more of his creations at Jalopnik. Link -via Digg

Martin Broomfield of 360 Cities took this panorama of a garbage collector/recycler in Jakarta, Indonesia, sitting down surveying his kingdom of recyclables.

It was typical to see garbage men pushing carts (like one behind the guy) filled with mounds of bags of aluminum cans and recyclable plastics when was living there more than 15 years ago. I wasn’t surprised that nothing much has changed.

If the embeddable player above doesn’t work for you, go here: Link – Thanks Jeffrey Martin!

This massive structure is filled with room after room of salvageable building materials in pristine condition, ranging from sprawling kitchens and custom cabinetry to a unique sauna and indoor pool slide.

At the company’s link are several pages of photos and a walk-through video.

The company saves money by inviting the public to go directly to the home to harvest materials; what remains is transported to their warehouse and store for resale.

Link.

Mr France said: “It was farcical. I thought we were being doubly green by taking our recycling there on foot.

“But whatever good we did in recycling our waste was probably counteracted by the CO2 emissions we used up in our car.”

The council responsible for tip said that because there is no “dedicated pedestrian access point” it was unsafe for people to walk there.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Flickr user hugovk)

YouTube Link

From The Fun Theory, a project by Volkswagen and the ones who brought us the piano staircase, comes bottle bank arcade.  Again the question is posed, “If we make it fun, will people start doing it?”  Yes, they will.

Thanks, Luna!

Photo: Tomas Valenzuela

Artist and environmental activist Oliver Bishop-Young’s project “Skip Conversions” tried to find creative and often amusing ways of recycling unwanted products. One example was a dumpster, which he turned into a swimming pool, a skateboard ramp, a living room, a garden, and a campsite. More pictures at the link.

Link via Urlesque | Artist’s Website

Who would have thought that shipping containers could be used in making beautiful homes? In this post at Green Diary, blogger Aditi Justa explored 10 of the most interesting homes (and structures) built with recycled shipping containers.

Take, for instance, the Redondo Beach Container House:

The Redondo Beach House is an architecturally designed shipping container based contemporary house to suit your site and lifestyle.

The award-winning De Maria Design’s luxury beachside house was constructed using eight prefabricated, recycled steel shipping containers, which are integrated with some traditional building techniques.

Built on modern lines, the sleek and elegant building is resistant to fire, mold and termites. About 70 percent of this affordable construction was assembled in a shop making it inexpensive, time-efficient and resource-efficient.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by supernova.

Most people want their furnitures to last, but not Ate Atema! His Auto-Cannibalistic Table (made in collaboration with designer Amy Campos) made from egg cartons and wheatpaste glue, is designed to be planted with herbs which "eat away" the table as they grow:

Why can’t a table eat itself? Tables support food, but why can’t they BE food too? The Auto-Cannibalistic Table understands that in nature energy and matter are in a constant state of transformation, cycling and recycling. It understands these facts and its design explicitly celebrates them. The Auto-Cannibalistic Table is made from paper egg flats, flour paste, soil and seeds, and when water is added, the seeds germinate and so the table begins to eat itself.

Inhabitat blog has more: Link

I made these plastic milk bottle lights by embedding LEDs in the caps, hanging them from a bent section of pipe and hooking them up to an Arduino microcontroller.

Not happy with an on-off switch, I thought they might look mesmerising with a rotary control knob turning them on in sequence. It works! They make great low lighting to wind down for sleep, and they’re great to hang in the hall for parties too.

There are complete build instructions on Instructables.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Nachimir.

The lawsuit, filed by San Carlos Deputy City Attorney Linda Noeske in San Mateo Superior Court on Jan. 22, seeks a permanent injunction forcing House to maintain garbage service. City officials are also seeking to recoup from House the costs of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims House broke the city’s municipal code requiring all residential, commercial and industrial properties to contract with Allied Waste for pickup at least once a week — a standard requirement in most cities, San Carlos Deputy City Manager Brian Moura said.

Moura said the suit was the result of complaints from neighbors about House burning garbage. House says he only burns wood. Link -via Geek Like Me

(image credit: Juan Carlos Pometta Betancourt/The Examiner)