Welcome back, you threshold-crossing creatives! Last week, we studied where we step, giving the lowly doormat its due. Did you raise the act of entering and exiting into performance art that expresses where you are going and where you have been? Perhaps you gave a doormat a good shake and searched the debris for some artistically minimalist motivation. No mat-ter the result, I hope your doormat provided a warm welcome—or at least refrained from blabbing about you to the homeowner’s association.
This week, we’ll take a few more steps away from the front door and visit another domestic landmark: the trashcan.
As an assemblage artist who uses discarded objects to create site-specific abstract sculptures, I pay attention to trashcans. I find them most interesting when they are failing: overflowing onto the sidewalk, evolving into insect friendly ecosystems, and inscrutable instructions about how to successfully complete your transaction.
Have we gamified trash? Outside my house, three different trashcans are collected by three different trucks. I assume this separation results in better health for our waste-disposal system, although the parade of enormous vehicles required to remove the evidence can feel slightly absurd. Manufacturing industries come and go, but our ability to manufacture, distribute, and store trash appears endlessly innovative.
Three years ago, I watched a trash truck (the solid waste one) dump my entire trashcan into itself. Can, contents and all disappeared into its crushing jaws. Before I had a chance to send a complaint through 311, a new trashcan magically appeared at my curb. The city had answered a question I didn’t know I was asking: How do you throw away a trashcan?
While traveling in Japan, I was struck by how clean the urban streets were despite the rarity of visible public trashcans. It seemed counterintuitive. Wouldn’t more trashcans mean less litter? Maybe the most effective trashcan is the one we have learned not to need.
I learn more about a community by studying what it throws away than by studying what it makes, buys, consumes, or watches. Please consider that an artistic observation, not permission to pick through your neighbor’s bins.
Stay curious, stay creative, and wear gloves at all times while we lift the lid on one or more of these disposable distractions:
- Bin’s Bestest: Examine your recycling and select the best example of something: best aluminum can, most sincere cardboard box or most complicatedly designed water bottle cap. Make the winner a tiny award on a sticky note. Photograph it like a Time’s “Person of the Year.” Prepare a brief acceptance speech on its behalf.
- Wasted Measures: Save one day’s worth of clean, non-food waste. Weigh it, count it, sort it by color, or arrange it end to end and measure the distance. Stack it as high as possible. Turn your findings into a chart, abstract drawing, or quarterly report for the shareholders: “Cardboard sector continues to outperform, aluminum can deposits continue to run lower as our organization transitions to Powerade.”
- Can Score: Listen when the trashcan lid opens and closes. Tap different safe, clean areas with your fingers and notice how the sounds change. Record a short rhythm or write a percussion score and play it for your favorite crow or squirrel.
- Space Waste: Imagine an invention that eliminates waste. Maybe produce travels in edible packaging, restaurants share one endlessly circulating takeout container or imagine a trash-based economy where your hometown pollution can be converted into cash. Sketch out that future, write its billboard, or create a list of unintended consequences. Even a perfect solution deserves a few design flaws.
- Rebel Without a Bin: Write a poem, monologue, or flash fiction about a recyclable object that refuses to be recycled. Perhaps an old tire doesn’t want to be turned into a gym mat. A cardboard box dreads going back into the truck for one more same day delivery. A plastic bottle insists it is not emotionally prepared to become a park bench. What does your object want to become—and what is it willing to throw away to get there?
Trashcans are designed to make things disappear, but creativity often begins by looking again at whatever everyone else has decided to ignore. This week, pause before you toss something away. You don’t have to keep it. Just give it a few moments of attention before allowing the trashcan to help everyone move on.
This column was written with help from ChatGPT, a tool that generates no banana peels but leaves behind a significant amount of digital debris.
