Coming from a war generation, Ben’s mom’s slogan was “Make new things out of old things”. There are a lot of ways to describe what they did: repurpose, reuse or my favorite, upcycle. Whatever you want to call it, it wasn’t only a way of being creative. It was a cost-effective way to make things useful a second time around, often using things considered to be trash.
Okay, sometimes trash is just that, trash, and it should stay trash. But often times it’s pretty incredible what imaginative usage people come up with. Some of the repurposed things I’ve seen even border on art. Of course, what exactly art is, is disputable so I won’t even try to go there in this post. Let me just focus on one example of reuse: drink containers.
Tetra Pak
Tetra Paks have been around since the 1950s. Ben remembers his grandparents being fascinated by the new packaging and saving the milk cartons. I believe they stacked them up under the kitchen table. They were probably thinking there must be a way to put these neat sturdy little boxes to use. They stacked real well, that was for sure. He never told me what, if anything they did with them but the possibilities are endless. I’ve seen robots and purses made from them although I doubt Ben’s grandparents made those things.
Coke
Undeniably, Coke is a huge, worldwide company. When you sell that much soda it has to be put into lots of containers. After you drink the Coke what do you do with the container? Throw it away? No, I can name a couple of usages right off the top of my head.
Glass Coke bottles were just begging to be made into something functional. Cut them at the right height, then sand down the edges and you end up with some attractive drinking glasses. If you only want beautiful, then cut off the top ring and string it into a necklace.
Ah, you might say but Coke is sold more in cans than bottles these days. What can one possibly do with cans? Ben was at a fair once and saw this. Pretty impressive work even if it doesn’t fly.
PET
But then Coke and the other Soda companies switched from the glass to the lighter plastic PET bottles. I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but I’m guessing in the mid to late 80s. Everyone knows PET bottles should be recycled, no creativeness there. Just put them into the recycling bin and they will be shredded and used again.
But wait. While Ben and I were walking our dog past a kindergarten a while back something caught our attention. There were “things” wired up on a wire mesh fence. Looking closer we saw they were the top part of PET bottles, cut and painted. But what were they supposed to be? Then we realized they were flowers! Multicolored flowers. They had been hanging there some time so many of the “flower” pedals were missing. Still, they were unmistakably flowers. Some teacher had taken the time and energy to cut, paint and then hang up what became PET flowers with the youngsters. Looking at them reminded me of a song from the 70s by Harry Chapin, Flowers are Red.
Flowers are Red
It’s a sad song about a little boy whose creativity was thwarted by his teacher. He wanted to color his flowers lots of different colors and she wanted them red with green leaves. In the end he believed her and did what she wanted.
That, in turn, reminded me that Ben’s third grade teacher told him he would never be able to draw. She told the little girl sitting next to Ben that she would never be able to do math. They both believed her, so Ben did his neighbor’s math which he was good at and she drew for him.
Ben still doesn’t think he can draw, maybe the teacher was correct but maybe not. A real life version of “Flowers are Red”? It’s incredible how much influence a teacher can have on a child.
Now, every time we pass the fence I look at the “flowers” again and think how that teacher got it right. Just looking at those colorful upcycled PET bottles wired to the fence makes me smile. It doesn’t get much more creative than that.
-
-