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Treasured Trash: Designing tumblers to avoid petbottles

9 Nov 2006 Category: Conscientious Design, Features, Japan, Products

Treasured Trash: Designing tumblers to avoid petbottles

"Treasured Trash" exhibition at Design Tide

Living in Tokyo by yourself is all about fighting your incombustible trash. Petbottles of tea, containers from your dinner last night, packs of soy sauce, plastic bottles of your shampoo and moisturizer etc. Almost everything in your room is made out of plastic and when it comes to trash - the petbottles are the ones which pile up most. Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo now makes fleece jackets out of recycled petbottles, but how many of us actually put the betbottles in the proper recycle box? Or how many of us own a recycled fleece jacket? If we consider the amount of petbottles we use, shouldn’t we all be wearing full fleece body suits all the time? Here is a report of the “Atsushi Toyama x ASYL CRACK live paint show” that happened during Tokyo Design Week - with a little hint of what we can do about petbottles.

Written by Chiemi

All Japanese pet bottles are colorless to make recycling easy. But do we really do tear off the tag, clean them and make sure they end up in the right container…?

Incombustible trash including big amounts of petbottles is a very serious issue in Japan. Yume no Shima (Dream Island) in Tokyo Bay and Moerenuma Park in Hokkaido are both based on incombustible trash. Both of these landfills are loved by the locals, however, if we keep doing this, how many more hills will we have to create? What will happen to the ground water? …? Avoiding pet bottles altogether or at least recycling them once you use them are a definitive must.

Moerenuma Park in Hokkaido was designed by Japanese -American artist, Isamu Noguchi. The amount of waste used to fill this space was about 2.7 million tons.

Last Friday, as a part of the group exhibition “Treasured Trash“, Design Tide, illustrator Atsushi Toyama and Naoki Sato from design company Asyl had a live painting show at the venue in Harajuku, Tokyo.

At this event special tumblers were decorated with Atsushi Toyama’s drawings and also the recycled box was turned into a treasure box by the collaboration of Atsushi Toyama and Naoki Sato from Asyl Crack. The main purpose was to draw more attention towards using personal tumblers as a way to avoid a constant buying of new petbottles besides demonstrating a beautiful way of recycling more petbottles by turning them into those recycled “treasure boxes”.

Atsushi Toyama on the right hand side

many sponges ready to be used..

drawing a line with a sponge..

now with a brush..

…and even the bottom of a spray can…

drying his work with hair dryer

Co-producer of this live event, Eiichiro Ichikawa from Phil talked to us about this event.

Mr. Ichikawa: This event is a part of the group show “Treasure Trash” produced by a creative unit gift, gift_lab and Asyl Crack. Asyl people contacted me first and suggested to do something together. Something demonstrating that “It’s not trash, it’s a resource. We want to stop to make valuable things become trash.”. I couldn’t agree more. Our meetings were about finding answers to our questions “What can we do to avoid trash? How can we give trash a more positive name?”. And we finally got an idea of making something fun that people want to hold in their hands and actually use. We really tried to recycle as much as possible! The 1st floor of this Design Tide event venue of this Toyo building used to be a shop for glasses, so the glass shelves they left behind are the ones we used here to exhibit our tumblers we designed. Even the paper Mr. Toyama drew on is recycled paper, so we planed this event looking at little things carefully.

A part of the planning sheet of this group show. It says “It’s not trash, it’s a resource. There’s nothing we can waste!”

Naoki Sato sticks cutting sheets on recycled boxes..

paint on it…

still wet paint

audience watching carefully

recycled box is now turning to a treasure box

using a special metal pattern to cut paper

Done! Colorful tumblers simply make people happy - longterm!

These tumblers were sold during this event. Some people came up to him and asked if they could have a particular part of drawing, other people picked up tumblers wondering about various different ways of using them…

Treasure box is done, too! Doesn’t it make you feel like the pet bottles you put into this box will have a new life? Can be used for something nice? Reincarnation almost… ;-)

This is the treasure box that used to be an ordinary recycling box. The 3 different holes on the surface are to separate the materials. One is for the body of the petbottle, one is for the lid and another one is for the label. Petbottles are one of the easiest products to separate but this treasure box will even make the recycling fun.

Still going. “Can you cut this bit for me?” It sounds like a conversation at a fish shop!

Greeting from Atsushi Toyama and Naoki Sato after the event. Thank you!

After this event, I got totally impressed by the power of design. There were people who didn’t know what was going on at the beginning of the event but at the end, many of them were interested in the use of these tumblers and this pretty recycling box.

Another nice idea! Cute thermos bottles were designed by Katsuki Tanaka, Paul Davis, Atsushi Toyama x Asyl Crack and Mogra.

Logo of this group exhibition “Treasured Trash” on the wall

Recycling issues are often ignored, but if something gets designed with love, we might start to pay more attention again. Hopefully the joy of using something so carefully designed helps to solve the problem slowly.

Thank you for everyone who cooperated with us for this article. We are going to have a full report of Design Tide and Tokyo Designer’s Week tomorrow!

14 Comments

Sincerely one of the most interesting posts on PinMag.
Thinking about the future, thinking about art, thinking about the new generation, thinking about our only home, the earth…
Just one question: Materials used to paint were disposable?
Keep the good work!

Posted by: nyuudo@hotmail.com on November 10th, 2006 at 12:29 am
Wonderful. This is really first time for me to learn that you should tear of the tags of the PET bottles..

Posted by: ヤーッコ on November 10th, 2006 at 1:02 am
wow, i made a DIY thumbler too!(with a IKEA cup), so wonderful works.
so every work-matters came and picked the cup siad: “cool! where did you get it?”

but its my first time saw so many cups with DIY skin. cool cool cool.

hemm..how about the price?

Posted by: x-noise on November 10th, 2006 at 2:55 am
i really enjoyed this article. i love this zine! i check it everyday, i tell all my friends about it.

Posted by: danny on November 10th, 2006 at 3:40 am
design makes beauty–>design enfluences life style—>design improves environment sustainable development. thank designers like Astushi and Naoki.

Posted by: keanu zhang on November 10th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Design truly has the power to accomplish great things!

Impressive! (^_^)

Posted by: Ben Tong on November 10th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
wonderful recycled art! garbage is a global problem, great to see what folks are doing about it in Japan. recycling really can work.

Posted by: Ruby Re-Usable on November 16th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
My name is Douglas Smith. I would like to show you some info on our Creative recycling festival in Spain that I would like to organize a program in Bulgaria and I am looking for partners for a EU GRANT that would be in JAPAN. Would like to find out how we can work together on this project.

We have the festival here in Barcelona December
16th thru 17th at the CCCB. Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
(www.cccb.org) If you have any representatives in Barcelona please forward them my email and I will add them to a list of people to see our event.
Would like to work with a program in Japan with Bulgaria and Spain. 3way programs are normal with EU grants.
Our Website is http://WWW.Drapart.org

Drap-Art is a non-profit organisation founded in Barcelona in 1995.
Drap-Art promotes creative recycling, through the organisation of
festivals, exhibitions and workshops.

Drap-Art’s aim is to enhance creative recycling as a tool of
transformation in the arts, the environment and society. Recycling,
reusing and recuperating revaluates things. This, not only helps to induce
a more reflexive consumerism, but also contributes to the growth of
respect for the environment and for the people living in it, leading
towards cultures based in knowledge and respect.
Moreover, creative recycling is a global and multicultural phenomenon that
occupies a significant position in the popular arts and crafts, in all
societies of the world. It was introduced into western art by the
avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century, and towards the end
recycling has entered the world of design and architecture.

Drap-Art as well as giving a new impulse to the movements in the arts that
use objects trouvés as a language of social criticism, wants to stimulate
people in general to use the possibilities that everyday life and trash
puts at their disposal to develop themselves creatively and with
independence, to use their critical thought and express themselves,
overcoming habits and traditions inherited from colonial times.

During the 20th century, characterised by the growing urbanism of a more
and more dehumanised and consumerist world, trash becomes a recurrent
element in some of the most significant currents in the arts. The Dadaists
and Duchamp, as well as Miró and Tàpies use found objects in their works
of art. In the same way Pop-Art, Arte Povera, Fluxus and the Nouveaux
Realistes, to name only a few, use everyday objects, apparently without
value, to symbolize the growing materialism and loss of humanity.

Now that a desolate future, provoked by an unsustainable global growth
presents itself more and more clearly, Drap-Art considers that it is of
utmost importance to animate the new generations to use recycling, not
only as a tool of criticism, but as a device at the disposal of everybody
to transform protest into positive proposals, which are the seeds of a
more sustainable world.

Sincerely,

Douglas E. Smith
Douglass@drapart.org
La Carboneria Espai Drap-Art
C/Groc, 1
08002 Barcelona, Spain
Tel/Fax 34 93 268 48 89

Posted by: Douglas E. Smith on November 29th, 2006 at 5:21 am
[...] When Atsushi Toyama features some cute colorful animals in his work, he always makes the audience feel warm and cuddly inside. PingMag already wrote about his group show called Treasured Trash in November as a part of Design Tide. There he introduced some nice ideas together with Naoki Sato from Asyl Crack about to avoid pet bottles. Today, we say a bit thank you to him for creating some cute greetings for PingMag featuring his little daughter. [...]

Posted by: PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about "Design and Making Things" » Archive » Illustration Series #2: Atsushi Toyama on December 29th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Designs are nice. It attracts you.
Good Work.

Posted by: helen on July 20th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Just wanted to let everyone know of our Festival again in Barcelona with Creative recycling. Would like to search for partners for a EU project with Bulgaria.

Posted by: Douglas E. Smith on September 8th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
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Posted by: fsdfd on November 27th, 2008 at 8:10 am
attention shit flying

Posted by: historic on November 27th, 2008 at 8:11 am
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ヤーッコ

Posted by: Julius Martin on May 1st, 2009 at 3:27 pm

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