Culture
“Trashion” Show Aims to Raise Awareness of Upcycling
By: Kelly Fisher
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On Tuesday evening, the floor of a common area in Ohio University’s Luchs Hall looked like someone’s trash bag ripped open, carpeted with plastic grocery bags, cardboard boxes, soup cans and more.
The Office of Sustainability put the pile there to shed some light on what can and cannot be recycled by creating an event that offers students an opportunity to turn someone else’s trash into their own treasure. The Tuesday workshop allowed participants to craft together clothing items, jewelry pieces, accessories and anything else they could conceive.
A scarf made of grocery bags, a skirt made of chip bags, a bracelet made out of an aluminum can and more will be modeled Saturday at “Trashion: The Up-cycled Fashion Show,” located in the Tanaka Multi-Purpose Room in the new Living Learning Residence Hall Complex near Adams Hall and the Charles J. Ping Center.
Just in time for America Recycles Day this Sunday, the Trashion Show will take place from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Aside from the Office of Sustainability staff providing refreshments and prizes, the event cost nothing. It is the first time the Office of Sustainability is holding a Trashion Show to raise environmental awareness, though representatives are not sure at this point whether it will happen again.
The idea of the show is to up-cycle, or to reuse any discarded objects or materials and create something more valuable, or of higher quality. Liz Rose, one of the event coordinators, said she and her co-coordinator, Abe Kitchen, had different takes on their trashion.
“His was more of the up-cycled part of the Trashion Show, and I was looking at more of the fashion,”she said. “We kind of had different takes on it, so it’s interesting.”
To advertise the event, Rose and another Office of Sustainability co-worker posed in outfits made entirely out of newspaper, including a vest, a skirt, a top hat and a bowtie, a design which took about 30 minutes to make.
Rose, a graduate student, collected her recyclable materials and her brother’s for about two weeks. When the time came to make trashion, she decided to focus on creating clothing items, such as a skirt made out of chip bags and a hat made out of a tin can — items that made up a new fashion out of recyclables. Kitchen, however, used aluminum cans and string to make bracelets and intricate necklaces that can be worn again.
“It’s pretty neat,” Rose said. “I’m looking forward to see what else he does because he’s putting his time into really quality pieces, whereas I made this really funky outfit.”
Donning their up-cycled trashions, the two turned heads as they walked through the residence halls within the past couple of weeks to spread the word to students about the event. Even if attendees don’t think of any trashion to make, Rose said they are still encouraged to come enjoy the creativity and learn.
The show will feature information clarifying what Athens-Hocking Recycling Center, Inc. can recycle and what must be thrown out. According to the company’s website, select items — scrap metal, yard waste and food waste can only be properly recycled if they’re brought directly to the site. Zero-waste information will also be available at the event, which will include providing recycling bins and composting bins.
The staff, however, remains unsure of the turnout; Rose expects attendance to be “all or nothing” at the show on Saturday.
“The Office of Sustainability has to be unique and thrifty in the way that they do things. …We have that responsibility to be socially responsible and not materialistic,” she said. “We try to work off of having zero budget, except for the money that he’s getting from housing for food and…prizes. Everything else has to be free…and I think that brings out an air of creativity. I think that it brings about a lot of challenges but it also kind of teaches you to expand your horizons.”