Trash is not always wasted. It can be recycled or even turned into educational exhibits.

Trash on show
Trash is not always wasted. It can be recycled or even turned into educational exhibits.
By DAVE COLLINS

IN a waterfront industrial area near the Bridgeport line in Stratford, Connecticut, the trucks keep dumping trash and the school buses keep dumping children.

Eight-year-old Matt Carlucci is in awe as soon as he walks through the front door of The Garbage Museum, confronted immediately by a colourful, 3.7m-tall dinosaur made out of junk. “Trash-o-saurus” resembles something out of the animated movie Robots.

Pennsylvania sculptor Leo Sewell, who grew up near a dump, fashioned the 7.3m-long piece out of old “no parking” signs, cell phones, shoes, licence plates, sunglasses, plastic toys and anything else he could get his hands on. Visitors are given a list of things to find on the dinosaur, and it’s no easy feat.

“It’s pretty cool,” Matt said during a trip with his third-grade class from Sherman, Connecticut. “All the garbage on it, how big it is and how much it weighs.”

The sculpture is 907kg, representing the average amount of garbage and recyclables each person in Connecticut discards each year. Like all the exhibits, Trash-o-saurus was designed with the goal of teaching how important recycling is.

The museum opened in 1993 at the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority’s (CRRA) recycling centre in Stratford, “before ‘green’ was cool,” a fact sheet says. About 32,200 people visited the museum and took part in its off-site programmes last year, a record.

“We don’t know of any other museums dedicated to garbage and recycling in the country,” said Paul Nonnenmacher, a spokesman for the CRRA, a quasi-public state trash agency.

The agency also operates a sister facility, The Trash Museum, in Hartford that drew more than 27,000 people last year.

“What’s exciting is the kids go home and tell their parents what they can recycle,” said Sotoria Montanari, the museum’s education supervisor.

While the dinosaur sculpture is popular, children have just as much fun in the viewing area over the centre’s sorting area, Montanari said. Trucks dump recyclables from 20 area towns, to the tune of 60,000 tonnes a year.

Huge piles of plastic bottles look made to jump into. Stacks of newspapers and cardboard fill another area. An assembly line of workers sorts the materials, which are crushed and sold as commodities to produce new products. Some buyers even make carpets and fleece jackets out of the recycled plastic, which can be turned into fibres.

Back down a flight of stairs near the dinosaur, children can play in a general store complete with a cash register, old cereal boxes and other reusable items.

An exhibit with stacked soda cans shows how making aluminum out of recycled materials creates 95% less air pollution and 97% less water pollution than mining bauxite.

Visitors can walk through the tunnel of a big, brown and plastic “composting pile” that has fake worms, bugs and pieces of fruits and vegetables sticking out of it.

Educator Robin Bennett can show you a real composting pile, and how a special kind of worm eats the garbage and converts it into what looks like dirt.

The Trash Bash activity imprisons helmet-wearing contestants behind chain- link fence doors and makes them answer questions. If the answer is wrong, others are given the green light to dump trash on them from an overhead opening.

There are also art exhibits made from reusable stuff, including a life-size mannequin made from crushed and coloured milk containers strung together with pipe cleaners. It all makes for a fun hour or two, but visitors say they also walk away with new knowledge and appreciation.

“You can see where all the garbage goes,” said 10-year-old Brooke Hiatt. “You can see how and where it goes and the process of recycling stuff. I’ve learned that recycling is better than just wasting. If you waste, you can pollute your environment.”- AP