A Garbage Truck RV, Garbage Homes, Garbage Art
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. These folks literally turned trash into treasures, building homes for the homeless out of discarded materials and creating art out of random garbage. One man even turned a garbage truck into a tricked-out RV for his family.
Doug Cuthbert, a retired naval architect, took his family on a 16-month tour of Europe and Asia in a garbage truck he meticulously transformed into a boat RV. The 34,000-pound 38-feet long RV boasts a 136-square foot interior, three bedrooms, a solar energy system, is fully automatic, has a 350 horse power engine, holds 360 gallons of water, 200 gallons of diesel, and gets 8 miles to the gallon (ouch!). It cost him $171,000 to build it.
Oakland artist Greg Kloehn tried his hand at making a small home out of garbage he found in his neighborhood. Once it was done, it sat in his studio. That is, until a homeless woman knocked on his door looking for a tarp and he realized he could instead give her a home. In recent years, he’s built more than a dozen small homes from illegally dumped trash (shelving, refrigerator doors, 2X4s, paint). One recipient of his work is Kelly, who hadn’t had her own home in 19 years. Check out his story and work in this nbcbayarea.com report.
Photographer Barry Rosenthal in Brooklyn picks up garbage. All day. And then painstakingly arranges it — sometimes for weeks — before shooting it with his camera. Spoons, forks, baseballs, flip flops, prescription bottles, cups, you name it, and Rosenthal has lovingly arranged it for a shoot. Sometimes he organizes his items by color and other times by shape. And, since New York City generates 3.2 million tons of garbage a year, according to this weather.com report, it doesn’t look like this photographer will run out of material any time soon. View his work on weather.com.
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