Oklahoma City’s first ZeroLandfill program to promote the upcycling — repurposing waste material into new products — of leftover interior design materials is hitting the metro this weekend.
ZeroLandfill is a nationwide program that supports the needs of local artists, educators and crafters while simultaneously promoting a sustainable Earth by diverting these materials from landfills.
Through donations from 18 interior design and architecture firms, 17,300 pounds of materials will be offered free to attendees and will be redirected from landfills.
Wilsonart with ISC Surfaces gathered together a committee of about seven volunteers to launch the event. Malia Tate, a certified interior designer at 3 Level Design, is one of these volunteers.
ZeroLandfill is a project of BeeDance LLC, a company based in Ohio that develops interactive biometric technology.
“So the concept originated from watching bees, and if you speed up a film when we’re actually doing our workshops, we just look like busy bees,” Tate said. “Pollination is where we bring all of our materials together ... and then harvest.”
About 20 designers, architects and fabric and lighting representatives throughout the community have gotten involved in the project. These volunteers collected and organized the many types of available materials, including carpet samples, paint decks and chips, fabric and wall covering swatches, vinyl and rubber flooring samples, tile samples, wood samples and design magazines, among others.
“For the artists, they could do anything from mosaics to multi-media art. We have wood veneers [and] fabrics. You could do quilting,” Tate said. “It’s pretty much endless as far as the artistic point of view.”
Tate also suggested that educators could use the carpet samples for indoor recess for the children, or she said art teachers could use fabric samples for tactile sensory activities.
Every educator or artist who upcycles materials is contributing to the process of keeping 8.65 tons of materials from being piled into Oklahoma City’s landfills.
Because the U.S. is the No. 1 trash- producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year, according to recycleok.org, all efforts to reduce those numbers are helping the environment.
Landfills are the second highest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S, according to the Recycling Toolkit for Oklahoma Communities
Print headline:
Artful reinterpretation: ZeroLandfill helps reduce local waste while supporting local artists and educators.
