Eco living 绿色生活

 

 

A Volivik Lamp made from disposable Bic Pens.

Spanish designers Lucas Muñoz and David Tamame have come up with an innovative and somewhat green use for disposable Bic Pens. The designer duo takes the disposable pens and metal paper clips and transforms them into trendy Volivik Lamps. We caught up with eStudio enPieza! located in Madrid, Spain, to ask a few questions about their lamps.

Tell us a bit about the lamps.

Each lamp is painstakingly handcrafted using, for example, 347 pens are drilled and cleaned and 347 paper clips that have to be cut. The iron is also drilled and bent until it is a circle. The whole structure is welded together, treated against corrosion and painted, then the pens are hung one by one from the structure, and the clips are closed. It is a painstaking job.

The Volivik 347 Lamp.

How long does it take to make a lamp?

As you can imagine, we don’t make the lamps one by one. But the average production time for one of our Volivik 347 Ceiling Lamp is one to two weeks.

Do you buy the pens or use recycled pens?

We acquire the pens via an office supply. Although the original intention of the collection was to use recycled pens, and the first piece that we still having here in the studio is made with used ones, the magnitude of collecting more than 10000 used pens to make the 30 ceiling lamps that we make is too big to attend to our clients’ needs.

The Volivik 50 Lamp.

Do people donate pens?

For the first unit, the pens were donated.

How many pens are used in each lamp?

The Volivik 347 uses 347 pens, the Volivik 50 uses 50, etc. We once made a Volivik 895 for a shop in Rome.

The Volivik 50 Lamp.

Is this a green project?

The Bic Pen is a disposable pen, designed to be used and thrown away. Using it this way, gives to each one a much longer and relevant life than the one they were produced for.

 

 

Elephant by Andrew Chase.

Andrew Chase is an artistic jack-of-all-trades. He is a skilled commercial photographer, a children’s book writer, and if that wasn’t enough, he is also a talented metal sculptor. Chase makes breathtaking large-scale mechanical sculptures from recycled automobile and plumbing parts. We caught up with the American artist to ask a few questions about his amazing artwork.

What is your background?

I've been a photographer for about 18 years, I started welding 15 years ago when I need security bars for my studio windows, and I couldn't afford to pay a company to build them. However, I could afford a small MIG welder. So I learned how to weld, and made them myself.

Please describe your artwork.

My photographs, furniture and sculpture all have something in common, they tend to be made of small pieces composited together, instead of single monolithic forms.

Are the sculptures mechanized?

They aren't mechanized, however all the joints rotate and can lock in place.  Anything that looks like it could move, does move.

Giraffe by Andrew Chase.

Do you use reclaimed materials to make the sculptures?

I use a lot of recycled materials in my work, mostly transmission and engine parts, as well as old electrical conduit, plumbing pipe, and plumbing fixtures. To me, manufactured things have a certain visual appeal and logic, they look, for lack of a better word, purposeful. If you look at a transmission part, you probably won't know what it does (I usually don't), but there's no doubt in your mind that it does something. Anyway, I use these worn, greasy, purposeful parts in my work to make it look believable and real. Also, the stuff is free. That's nice too.

Where do you get the materials?

I get most of my material from transmission and auto repair shops. They're usually happy to give me as much as I can take.

Do you always make animal sculptures?

Not always, I've made a couple of tanks, a humanoid robot, a gigantic Gothic cathedral and a conference table/early steam engine. So far though, animals are my favorite

Please describe your artistic process.

I start off with the head, that's the most important part and the easiest to get wrong. After the head's completed, I make a basic skeleton out of conduit, using bearings for the major joints. Once I get proportions right and everything is looking symmetrical, I start filling out the body, thickening the limbs, and adding pistons and gears where appropriate.

When deciding what to make, I try to draw parallels between existing machines and animals. For instance, a giraffe operates a lot like a crane; the major muscles that raise and lower a giraffe's neck are at the base of it's neck, controlling movement through long ligaments much the way a crane uses a winch at it's base to control it's long boom arm.

Creatures from the children's book Timmy by Andrew Chase.

How long does it take to make one of your sculptures?

It takes about 80-120 hours to do a piece.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I'm working on a cheetah, it's coming together nicely but slowly. It will end up being about five feet long including the tail.

Do you have a dream sculpture you would like to make?

This will sound strange, but I'd really like to do a cool, ridiculously over-sized airport sculpture. Something gigantic, like a mammoth or a steam-punk blimp.

Are your sculptures for sale?

Right now, the only piece for sale is the giraffe, for US$6000.  However, I do take commissions...

Where can people see your work?

At www.andrewchase.com or swing by the studio.

Anything you would like to add?

I originally built the animal sculptures to use as characters in "Timmy", a children's picture book I wrote.

Visit: www.andrewchase.com

Via: Ecofriend.org

 

 

 

Recycled Glass Robots from Bedrock Industries in Seattle.

Long before it became fashionable or even mainstream, artist and designer Chris Munford, was committed to using recycled materials in his art. The ability to coax whimsical, beautiful and functional works of art from 100% recycled glass is no small feat, but Bedrock Industries located in Seattle is doing just that.

The American company creates one of a kind art installations, garden sculptures, stunning glass tiles, recycled beer bottle glasses and even quirky mobiles. We caught up with Chris Munford to ask a few questions about working with recycled glass and about his fabulous recycled glass robots.

Tell us a bit about your company.

Founded in 1992, dedicated to creating beautiful products from 100% recycled glass collected only from local sources.

Please describe the type of artwork you make.

Our main product is our Blazestone recycled glass tile.  We also have an amazing offering of home and garden decor, from modern and classic to kind of, well goofy.

Recycled Glass Robots from Bedrock Industries in Seattle.

How much recycled glass do you use?

Again it's 100% recycled material, we process everything here at our Seattle factory.  We estimate we use 250 tons of glass every year.

Is recycled glass harder to work with?

Simply put, yes!

What are the challenges of working with recycled glass?

Using zero new materials is a benefit, but there is a fair deal of selective collection you need to do to assure you are working with compatible glass sources. There is often an "unknowable" aspect to recycle materials that can prove very frustrating to some; we've had 17 years of experience and expertise to work from.

Glass tile made from 100% recycled glass from Bedrock Industries.

Are some colors difficult to find in recycled glass?

In consumer bottles blues can be rare, but very in demand.  Sources for red/yellow and orange art glass or stained glass are hard to come by in the recycled world.

Where do you get your glass?

We collect everything on site from within 30 miles. We collect window glass from window and door manufacturers, glassmakers, and local contractors. We collect consumer bottle through our Bottle Drive open 7 days a week, where we pay $0.20 a pound for clean de-labelled glass.  We also collect art glass and stained glass from local glass studios.

Recycled Glass Robots from Bedrock Industries in Seattle.

What sort of things do you make from the glass?

Our Lovestone hearts have been one of our best selling items year after year; they are simple, effective and inexpensive.  Our Blazestone tile is the most far reaching and in demand products. The tumbled glass is a great product for landscaping and garden design. Our ever-changing assortment of garden items keeps our creative juices flowing.

We love your robots. What is your favorite or signature item?

I love the robots too; they are so funny and unique.  I'm a big fan of our tile as it has just unlimited possibilities and gets used in so many creative installations

Recycled beer bottles glasses from Bedrock Industries in Seattle.

Is your studio open to the public?

We have a factory outlet store open 10-6pm, seven days a week; we arrange monthly tours of our factory for groups.

The main purpose of this site is to explore means and tools for living as sustainably and self-sufficiently as possible as the world enters a new phase of dwindling fossil fuels and the resultant rising energy costs. Eco-living has two levels: the individual and the community.

At the individual level, eco-living means that we become as self-sufficient as possible in terms of the necessities: food and energy dependency. This site explores options for reducing our food dependency on distant corporations. It also examines methods by which we can take ourselves "off the grid" as much as possible--if not entirely.

At the community level, eco-living entails reverting back to a more traditional way of life which includes weaning ourselves from our complete dependence on sources far removed for everything we need for survival and economic activity. For almost all of history--with the anomalous exception of the last 100 years or so--smaller communities were capable of producing the basic necessities of survival, especially if called upon to do so by external events.

In most cases, they could grow their own food and maintain a certain level of economic activity to ensure their member's survival. Over the last century we have lost this ability. The 2005 movie by director Ron Howard, Cinderella Man, accurately depicts life during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Most people, particularly city dwellers, found themselves as helpless as newborns. Without employers to provide them with work, they spent the days and years living from government check to check. They had become completely dependent upon the state. Contrast that with the independence of frontier communities just 80 years earlier which would have taken such a depression in their stride.

A decreasing fossil fuel supply will most likely mean a slowdown in economic activity as well a trend towards producing necessities such as food locally or regionally instead of relying on suppliers a half-a-world away. However, the transition will neither be quick nor smooth. This means that you need to prepare today to deal with possible shortages.

You can use the following links to go straight to the topics of most interest to you. The pages on Peak Oil are a good start for putting everything into context with the "big picture".