Trash Cans as Public Art

If your notion of a trash can is simply that of an everyday utilitarian product, you should take a look at what the non-profit known as the Steel Yard has been working on for the past few years. As part of its Urban Furniture program, the Steel Yard, based in a 5600 SF industrial space in Providence, Rhode Island, collaborated with local artists to design and fabricate a series of distinctive steel trash cans (along with a number of other street-based art/products), in an effort to revitalize and beautify the Industrial Valley district within the city. Working with the Olneyville Housing Corporation, the organization sought to create aesthetically beautiful (as well as thought provoking) works of art and function, that would aid in improving the neighborhood of Olneyville, while at the same time elevating the public dialogue of what it means to be a community in transition.

(All photographs courtesy of Steelyard’s flickr gallery)

On one level, what the Steel Yard has done with this project, is demonstrate how a community of diverse populations, vocations, etc, can come together to essentially “unify” a city, even if one neighborhood at a time, and how this can be done through the installation of functional “street art”. If urban living does eventually become the norm, it is all the more reason to make our urban spaces more enjoyable and livable, and hopefully more cities will realize that something as simple as a trash can presents an accessible way to achieve that. And to do so through creative collaboration, is surely a testament to how strong a community like Olneyville has already become.

Thomas Friedman’s Earth Day Lecture at Brown University

For Earth Day, Thomas Friedman, the well author and journalist spoke at Brown University. He joined the New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in petroleum industry and economy news and has won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times to date. His work has covered “the Middle East conflict, the end of the cold war, US domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. Today, his foreign affairs column appears two times a weekly in the Times. Friedman’s reporting specifically on sustainability appeared on the Discovery Channel in the documentary titled, “Green: The New Red, White and Blue.”

His lecture focused on outlining the book he’s been working on entitled “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” His first time releasing any public information about the book, and started off by telling the audiece that is we really “go green,” the United States could be the “strongest, most innovative and entrepreneurial country in the world. He also added that we’d be solving a problem that everyone is facing, the issue of becoming sustainable. Friedman declared that 2007 was the “beginning of a new era, marked by a convergence of individual flames that have come together into a fire. It’s a perfect storm between global warming, what I call, global flattening and global population growth.” His theory is that rising temperatures, access to more information and population growth have all created a real awareness of the issue are also seen as a “tipping point,” and people are starting to take action. After years of neglect and expending resources, our current generation with the problems we have today. He made the analogy of our current situation as a society being “a monster truck with the gas pedal stuck.”

Friedman described that we’ve gone from BCE to CE and to now ECE, which is the “Energy Climate Era.” Outlined in his 3 goals to meet the challenges of the Energy Climate Era are, “clean energy, efficiency and an ethic of conservation.” He discussed his skepticism of the “green revolution,” stating that we’re in something more of a “green party” if anything. After doing a Google search for “easy ways to go green.” he found titles such as “10 Ways to Save the Earth and Money in Under a Minute” and “10 Ways to Green Up Your Sex Life: Vegan Condoms and Solar Vibrators.” The real revolution, he say’s will come but you’ll really know it. He made the comparison that the real massive change will occur “like the IT revolution” in the sense that businesses and our economy will “either change or die.”

Green Technology Conference: Joel Makower Keynote

Covered by Cutter Hutton of Kaiju Studios.

Yesterday in Providence, Rhode Island the Brown Forum For Enterprise held its Green Technology Conference where a wide range of “green” related presentations were made. Kicking off the event was Joel Makower’s excellent keynote, Business, the Environment and the Bottom Line. For those unable to attend, his presentation was a diverse discussion of sustainability in the business world, a few of the key points being:

- Industries that were traditionally unrelated are finding themselves in the energy business as sustainability becomes a driver. Automotive firms will need to focus on the nation’s electrical infrastructure to implement plug-in cars, while Tyson chicken is attempting to use its 2.3 billion lbs of chicken fat waste as bio-fuel.

- Surprising savings can be had when a company begins to measure where its environmental impacts and inefficiencies lie and addressing those issues with innovation solutions. By replacing traditional wood pallets in its manufacturing plants with cardboard versions, GM was able to save $100,000 a day in costs, and switch from a non-recycleable waste product to a recyclable alternative which is purchased after use by outside firms, saving an added $50,000 a day.

- Many companies are silent on the environmental improvements they are making out of fear of enlightening consumer’s to a problem they were unaware of, and that this would lead to demands of more improvements or face a consumer backlash.

- Joel uses 3 questions to determine if a company is “good enough” in improving their green impact.

1- what do you know? You have to know your impacts to solve it.

2- what are you doing about it? There has to be tangible action to improve those impacts.

3- what are you saying about your improvements? How are you telling the public about what you are doing.

Joel’s talk was an informative and entertaining opening to get the audience primed for the other presentations at the conference. He also provided the take-away line of the day: “Sustainability is like teenage sex; everyone says they do it, few actually are, and those that are doing it don’t do it well.” Find out more at Joel’s site, where you can read his fantastic blog Two Steps Forward.

For more information about the Brown Forum For Enterprise click here.