"Recycle Week" -- sponsored by the U.K. organization Recycle Now -- is currently underway in England, Scotland and Wales and will conclude on June 28, 2009. In its fifth year, the goal of the week long educational event program is to offer the public infinite ideas on how they can conserve resources and generate less waste. In conjunction with their website Recyclenow.com, they strive to offer consumers varied ideas on how to reduce what ends up in the waste stream via handy how to tips and recycling pledges. Since its inception, it's estimated that an average of 30 million tons of CO2 have been saved thanks to their Recycle Week efforts alone. While materials such as glass, plastic, paper and bottles have been commonly recycled for years, Recycle Now is attempting to take things one step further by working with the sustainable solution based charity Oxfam International to bring textile recycling into the mainstream consciousness.
In addition to the many community workshops they are offering across Great Britain for the next several days, one of the more prominent companion pieces to their event demonstrates the impact that recycling can have if we all chip in and do our part. Using grass as canvas and 200,000 crushed recycled soda cans as silvery "paint", a team of 10 British artists assembled this massive artistic homage to a 1949 pin-up Coke ad created by Haddon Sundblom in Seven Sisters, East Sussex. Entitled "Precious Metal" and viewable in its entirety only from a plane, the artists will break down their piece and drop all of the cans off to a recycling facility once Recycle Week has concluded, theoretically conserving enough energy to power a television for seventy years.
Do you think that an American version of "Recycle Week" would inspire you to do more than you already are to conserve resources? Would it convert people who are still on the fence?
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