This Jewelry Is Trash, Literally - It's Jewelry Made from Trash in Mexico Adele Peters - Co.EXIST
go to original September 17, 2015

A vest made from tape reel. A ring from orange peel. An inspiring class shows how creative materials are all around us. (Precious Waste)

For most people, a box of old VHS tapes sitting in the closet will eventually end up in the landfill. Few cities recycle videos, and unless they're rare, nobody wants to buy them. But when a student in Mariana Acosta's jewelry class found some videos at home, she started thinking about necklaces.

"Dafne rescued them from misery and started transforming them," says Acosta, a designer who leads a project called Precious Waste at Mexico's Universidad Gestalt de Diseño, helping students learn to design with trash.

Old videos aren't easy to work with. "The tape just wanted to unroll, and every single time ended up on the floor in a messy pile," says Acosta. "She wanted so hard to control the tape that one day I asked her to just let the mess be, to take a bunch of tape and just play with it. She ended up tangled in it, and from that she decided to design a 'chaos vest.'"

Each student in the class starts by studying the trash around them - both what they're throwing out themselves, and more unusual waste that they can find in different environments. "After a selection of at least 40 materials is made, they have to analyze them and meticulously classify them," Acosta says. The material can be anything - egg cartons, soda can tabs, industrial packaging, old magazines - as long as it is abundant enough. Then they start to experiment.

Read the rest at Co.EXIST

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!