In a similar vein to Ecoist’s bags from old movie posters, BannerBags makes, well, bags out of old banners. Specifically, PVC banners (the sort that hang on lampposts etc) and the tarpaulins used on the sides of trucks.

At the moment, they’re concentrating on making bags out of banners used to advertise the Capital of Culture stuff in Liverpool – some of them quite obviously tied in (like the one above) but others are more subtle (like those below).

They’ve got a number of different designs available – flight bags (above), laptop/messengers (the Anglican Cathedral one below) and bowlers (like the hand one) – but are apparently open to suggestions if you fancy something else.

On a related topic, we’re off to Liverpool tomorrow for the launch event of the Recycle Into Art week of workshops – should be fun :)

Alison Bailey Smith, of the very cool wire hats, baskets and clothes, has told me about a recycling week that’s happening in Liverpool later this month.

Organised by Red Dot Exhibitions, “Recycle into Art” is a week of workshops about turning waste materials into art, furniture and various things like bags and musical instruments. There is also a trip to a recycling plant in Bootle. It all sounds wonderfully interesting and fun – and best of all, it’s FREE!

The full programme of workshops is on the site as are the contact details of the person to get in touch with if you want to go to them.

I’m hoping to go to the launch event on the Friday (because I heart St Luke’s aka the bombed out church) and hope to go to Alison’s all day workshop too – I just wish I had time to go to all the sessions (boo work, boo).

Last week’s post on HA Schult’s Trash People reminded me of something I saw on Alice in Blogland‘s blog a few months ago (Alice is a regular commenter on this site and was the one that suggest we should make the reverse Recycle This idea a regular thing – hi Alice! :) )

Anyway, she linked to the awesomely amazing work by photographer Chris Jordan, which really illustrates the scale of the problem we face when it comes to trash.

His “Running the Numbers” exhibition combines awesome visuals with statistics about usage/wastage in contemporary America – for example, his ‘Cans Seurat’ picture “Depicts 106,000 aluminium cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds”. (It covers other social issues too – for example, gun-related deaths per year and the amount of children in the US without health care.)

Speaking about his previous exhibition ‘Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption’, Chris said:

“The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.”

Most of our recycling-stuff-into-art posts so far have been rather crafty so here is something at the more fine art end of the scale.

Despite the exhibition being around for a decade, I’ve some how managed to miss HA Schult’s ‘Trash People’.

This army of 1000 figures – made from crushed cans, electronic waste and other rubbish – has stood in public spaces in Rome, Barcelona, Moscow, New York, Paris – and even dotted along the Great Wall of China.

The pictures show you the detail but it takes a video (or the very long shots on Schult’s website) to show you the scale – the amount of the figures. The video below shows someone walked around the Cologne, Germany exhibition.

A very cool display – and hopefully one that got people thinking more creatively about their rubbish, or at least thinking about not producing so much.

(Creative Commons Attribution photos from dbking on Flickr – bigger pictures available on there too)