On the 12th Day of Christmas, my Daddy said to me...?
...“Let's go round the streets collecting unwanted Christmas trees and make them into an Andy Goldsworthy-esque sculpture / den in the park, and hopefully not get arrested for carrying a small hatchet in public.”
Perhaps because I’d been working on Fight/Right to Repair for the last year in 2023 with RS DesignSpark, you start to find yourself ‘seeing opportunities everywhere’ once you get into a mindset that so many things around us, once consumed, perhaps have a second, or even third life - and need not be junk right away. They can be repaired, regifted, reused, remixed. As we often asked at the LEGO Group, “how do we extend the play?”.
I loved commissioning a blog on using Vape Batteries to power a Drone from author, ‘Concrete D0g’, and it remains one of my favourite ‘hacks with heart’ - as it really illustrates that we throw away a vape battery that still has an incredible 500 re-charges left in it (never mind the material waste), and as Material Focus reports, we throw away 5 million per week in the UK.
Sustainability requires us to consume less... but this is hard of course, for a multitude of complex reasons. Perhaps an interim ‘hack’ is to ‘extend the play’ or ‘extend the use’ of things - even if this does not curb the purchase of one thing, it perhaps delays the purchase of something else, and that is the ‘thin end’ of a bigger wedge of a change of mindset.
Growing up in a frugal household, I have always enjoyed opportunities to be resourceful and this is perhaps a ‘flex’ on that spirit. It’s not a Bah-Humbug on buying a tree, but a rallying cry to perhaps have more fun with it...to appreciate it, our environment, and our creativity that little bit more.
? Build Guide on Instructables, and other links, below in Comments....
#upcycle #recycle #reuse #remix #repurpose #xmas #tree #kids #hacks
