Exhibition Diverts 52.32kg of Waste from Landfills

Hey You! Let's Talk About Waste is a group on campus exploring issues of sustainability and consumption at Emily Carr. They held an exhibition from February 24-March 1 in the Michael O'Brian Exhibition Commons that tackled environmental issues.

The exhibition featured 20 students who were investigating ideas including "consumerism, over-consumption, behavior change, material use, repurposing, disposability, process, understanding and many more." The exhibition was curated by students Maddy Phillips, Kaylene Johnstone and Keely Bruce, and was co-sponsored by the Emily Carr DESIS Lab.

One aspect of the event programming was a garbage pile installation on Wednesday, February 27. This event was a "creative audit" of all the landfill waste produced on campus the previous day, February 26. All waste was sorted and itemized by students Keely, Maddy, Amanda, Roche and Morgan.

All in all, Emily Carr produced 149 bags of waste weighing 92.02 kg on Tuesday. These included items like:

• 141 coffee to-go lids
• 50 bottles and cans
• 149 plastic bags
• 4.84 kg of paper
• 29.88 kg of organics
• 1 computer charger

Students separated items that could be composted or recycled and even used a large roll of discarded paper to document their process on the gallery walls. Overall, they reduced the total amount of landfill waste to four bags weighing 39.4kg.

The exhibition demonstrated that small shifts in our habits, thinking and consumption patterns could have a massive impact on reducing the amount of waste produced by our community.

If you'd like to follow more of their activities, Let's Talk About Waste is on Instagram.