The Museum of Garbage is Open, Sort of

I guess it will always remain the work in progress, M's Museum of Garbage. So don't expect an official ribbon-cutting. But I took some pictures of what's there and will now (finally) share them. But first, a disclaimer - nothing in this museum is organized on shelves or displays. Stuff is pretty much everywhere and you have to know that it's a museum piece.

First, there's this giant poster. Ok, ok, I did draw the garbage trucks and colored most of them. M did color some of it, but he mostly concentrated on drawing the rest of the stuff on the poster. It's kind of hard to see, but there's blue sky and a bright yellow sun shining onto roadways and a couple of tall buildings. Originally, M planned on drawing a bunch of small houses so garbage trucks would have lots of garbage to pick up. But then he realized that it'd be a lot of work. So instead he drew two multi-story apartment buildings.

Then there's a recycling stations and a garbage burning factory next to the buildings and a landfill (where all the pieces of paper are glued to the poster).

Next, on the door leading into the museum room (family room), there's a garbage bag sample. M wanted to show what garbage bags are made of and cut a piece of plastic out of one and put it on the door. In case you don't get it, there's a whole entire trash bag hanging on the handle.

Here's M's snowboard that he made for me. Why a snowboard? I don't know. I think he watched an episode of "How Things Are Made" that featured a snowboard making factory. I think what really stuck in his mind was how snowboards get decorated. So he used some painters' tape and pencils and then asked me to draw the "Waste Management" logo (he colored it) and a few garbage trucks.

On the wall underneath the window there are two Contact paper collages. One is called "The trash of our house" and the other one - "The trash of our yard". M had a third one in mind, "The trash of our world", but it's kind of really ambitious so he hasn't started yet.

There are also all his garbage trucks with their hoppers usually full of garbage (ok, torn paper, pieces of cut up cardboard, pebbles, small ziploc bags, etc).

There's usually some sort of block structure, but it changes. The one on the picture now is WALL-E's house with rotating shelves. Before that, it was a recycling operation with a conveyor belt and a compactor. And before that there was a SMART station (from one of the recycling videos on YouTube).

Oh, and there's also a stash of pictures M took of various pieces of garbage (above is just one example from our "know your garbage" experiment), a cut-out about some super-efficient trash burning station, and some blueprints M drew of recycling operations. And that's our museum!

He'll be happy to show you his museum if you are in town. The admission is free and the museum is open most days, morning to night.