Meet our friends from Terracycle! Or, rather, what they do. From their website:

“TerraCycle’s purpose is to eliminate the idea of waste. We do this by creating national recycling systems for previously non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle waste. Anyone can sign up for these programs, called the Brigades, and start sending us waste.

TerraCycle then converts the collected waste into a wide variety of products and materials. With more than 20 million people collecting waste in over 20 countries, TerraCycle has diverted billions of units of waste and used them to create over 1,500 different products available at major retailers ranging from Walmart to Whole Foods Market.

Our goal is to eliminate the idea of waste by creating collection and solution systems for anything that today must be sent to a landfill.

Founded in 2001 by Tom Szaky, then a 20-year-old Princeton University freshman, TerraCycle began by producing organic fertilizer, packaging liquid worm poop in used soda bottles. Since then TerraCycle has grown into one of the fastest-growing green companies in the world.”

Terracycle picked up a bunch of shadow boxes from The Resource Exchange, reclaimed from the Walnut Street Theatre’s 2011 production of The Ugly One. They used these boxes to create a museum wall in their Trenton office, to share the company’s history and display samples of the products they’ve created over the years.

Visit Terracycle online, or give them a call at 866.967.6766 for more information about their work! We are excited that we could provide reclaimed materials to an organization with such a great and like-minded mission!

There’s more than one way to ride a bike in style.

A few weeks back, our friends Samantha and James [of Mr. and Mrs. Magoo's Traveling Trash Puppet Circus] created this gorgeous mascot-style Grumpy Cat with reclaimed faux fur from The Resource Exchange.

We think you should follow their example and make a costume for the Derby. And we think you could find everything you need at RE! Mention the Derby for a discount on select materials!

Remember these? These screens, salvaged from a film, have been repurposed before as interior decor. But they have great potential outdoors as well! The South Philly tree below needed a little help, so our friend Caitlin Perkins used a reclaimed screen as a trellis.

Much better! Good to know that reclaimed materials are helping the environment in more ways than one. But this trellis isn’t the only purchase from The Resource Exchange to be repurposed with a green thumb. I’m sure you’ve heard all about how our aluminum slide trays make great seed starters, but have you heard of Aaron Fleury’s Message in a Bottle DIY Terrariums? Aaron used reclaimed bottles from The Resource Exchange to create terrariums, and is now creating an illustrated guide to developing ecosystems within reclaimed bottles and jars.

But don’t stop there! Caitlin and Aaron aren’t the only ones exploring reclaimed gardening tactics. Meet Dylan Devlieger. Dylan is a recent graduate of Tyler School of Art and The Resource Exchange’s newest employee. While at Tyler, he used reclaimed materials from The Resource Exchange to create portable gardens. Check out his environmentally-related art below, and say hi next time you’re in the shop!

Our friends from New Hope were back for more lumber and props a few weeks back.

Recognize that bedpost from Arden Theatre Company’s CInderella? It got a second chance to be on stage, this time in New Hope Academy’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. This production sourced many of their set and prop materials from The Resource Exchange, most notably lumber from Simpatico Theatre Project’s The Amish Project. Read more about New Hope Academy, and the beginning of their project, here.

They painted a cyclorama backdrop, used reclaimed props and furniture to populate the stage, and built some great elements to extend the setting beyond the edge of the stage.

Here is a gallery of photos from their build process.

New Hope presented two performances of Fiddler on the Roof last weekend at the Yardley Community Theater [64 Main Street Yardley PA].

After their production, they brought over 200 pounds of material back to The Resource Exchange, so that other productions could continue to reuse it. It’s great to limit the waste created by theater productions by reclaiming material and channeling it back to creative reuse outlets. New Hope’s project is a particularly awesome example because the production gave these young people a chance to learn and explore their ability to create art sustainably.

Remember this?

Look very closely, and you’ll see CDs and tubing used in repetition to create a monster. Sometimes small pieces, repeated, can have amazing visual impact while maintaining flexibility.

How could you use the following materials, all available for low cost at The Resource Exchange, to skin your sculpture for the Derby?

Lisa Marie Middendorf and her friends recently visited The Resource Exchange, looking for lumber to make a table. They went home with this pile of 2×6.

These painted boards were once part of the set for Arden Children’s Theatre’s production of Cinderella. The legs and apron have yet to be painted, but this farmer’s style table is well on its way to being completed.

We love seeing materials from the arts become practical, beautiful objects made by individuals. Thanks for stopping by, Lisa Marie and friends!

Melissa Maddonni Haims a fiber artist based in Philadelphia. She uses alternative — mostly recycled, reclaimed + rescued — materials, specifically vintage fabrics and yarn, to create large scale crochet + knit installations. While the majority of her work shows in galleries, she has a passion for public art and graffiti. She has been yarn bombing since early 2010.  Her art career began in New York City in the 1990’s, and life led her back home to Philadelphia in 2004, where she lives with her husband and their daughter.

This month, Melissa will be exhibiting a performance installation entitled “Offering” at 3rd Street Gallery. Her show will consist of hundreds of stones covered with crochet, reminiscent of the offerings of rocks and stones left at the feet of deities and on headstones at Jewish cemeteries. As she has explored religious offerings made to the dead in several cultures, she has found that different societies have diverse traditions to celebrate the end of life. While Haims has responded to a death before with her work, this time she takes a new approach by including herself as part of the exhibit. Each day of the show, she will sit and crochet within the exhibition, continuing to add to the pile of stones. Every day the exhibit and offering will grow and change.

Many of the pieces are actual stones, but the majority of the individual rocks are made of recycled materials, most sourced from The Resource Exchange. Much of the yarn as well as the stuffing, which is scrap fabric and foam, was purchased from RE over the last seven months.

Also in May, Haims will install a series of cakes at the Philadelphia International Airport, Terminal D. This exhibit, cake!, will remain in the terminal through the end of the year. The cakes, pictured above, are best described as Dr. Suess meets the Cake Boss. Exciting, fun, and unlike her regular work, these pieces feature precariously placed layer upon colorful layer, piped with crocheted frosting and roses. The cakes are stuffed with recycled fabric and foam from The Resource Exchange, and are created with yarn rescued from thrift shops up and down the east coast. To see more of Melissa’s work, including yarnbombing at Mount Pleasant in Fairmount Park and in Westport, Connecticut throughout May and June, visit her online at melissamaddonnihaims.com.

Paper: flat, white, mundane. Right? Hold on just a minute, there, partner. Remember the excellent horse sculpture that we featured last week in our fabric post? How great would it be if that sculpture…. moved?

Okay, okay, I know: every sculpture in the Derby moves. But what if you programmed in more movement than just the mileage provided by your bicycle structure? Today, we’re featuring beautiful kinetic sculptures that use paper, to inspire you to use paper in your Derby sculpture for more than just skinning, cladding, or signage.

Paper doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Not only is it often recycled, almost always recyclable, and in many cases biodegradable, it’s also flexible, porous, and can become anything from structure to skin. The narrator of the next video knows how this simple material can be manipulated to create great and interesting objects. Its simplicity and flexibility make it particularly easy to endow with organic qualities through movement.

Think, for example, about how well the built-in movement of a bicycle could create unusual movement of epic proportions if properly harnessed! Take a look at this sculpture, and tell me I’m wrong:

If you’ve looked through the flatfiles in the shop, you know we have reclaimed foamcore, matboard, and drawing paper. But we also have a variety of construction paper tucked away, as well as reams and reams of reclaimed colored copy paper for just $5 a ream! We even carry natural fiber papers and paper building materials!

Even if you don’t want to build an extra-kinetic sculpture, you can reclaim paper in plenty of interesting ways for the Derby. Remember our cardboard tubes? They are a paper product you can get creative with. You can also make tubes of your own, like Sumer Erek did when he created The Newspaper House.

And if there’s anything more interesting and beautiful than quilling, I don’t know what it is. Whether structural or decorative, paper is a tool that is easy to reclaim and manipulate — perfect for your Derby sculpture! When shopping for your project at The Resource Exchange, remember to mention the Derby for your discount!

Dalyn Montgomery took the reclaimed canvas pictured above — originally from a film set — and reused it as a painting surface. This endeavor involved extra reuse skills because the canvas had a hole in one corner. Dalyn was up for the challenge! You can see more of his work at http://brohammas.wordpress.com/.  

Dalyn visits The Resource Exchange with Marlee, one of our favorite young reCreators. She’s recently developed an interest in classical dress. Check out the toga she fashioned from reclaimed fabric within an hour of getting home from the store!

Welcome to the studio of artist Joshua Mosley. He teaches art and animation at the University of Pennsylvania. In his animation studio, he needed some black-out fabric for a very large 30′ x 10′ window. The Resource Exchange’s duvetyne — fabric with a velvety nap that gives it a matte finish and high-opacity — did the trick. Josh attached some heavy-duty magnets to the fabric (reclaimed from a film set) so that he can easily pin it up to the steel window frame and rip it down at a moments notice.

Luckily, he visited The Resource Exchange with his son, Jasper, who also seems to celebrate creative reuse. We never knew our batch of mismatched K’NEX had such a bright future!

“Young man, you amaze me!” Architect! Visionary!

(And can we talk about how cool your parents have to be to encourage this kind of building? Keep on keepin’ on, my friends; you are clearly doing something right.)