This project started when Mr. Klompmaker brought in a metal detector just to play around with. It caught our eyes, so we decided to roam the school forests, looking for scrap metal using the metal detector. At first, we didn't know what to do with the scrap metal, but a classmate suggested to us to turn the scrap metal that we collected into some sort of art, and thus, our project was born. We decided to spell the words "Garbage Can" as a play on words, mounted on a wood background, more on that later.
Step One: Finding and Collecting Metal
The first thing we did was go out into the forest and look for scrap metal using the metal detector. While we were sweeping the area with it, it would stop buzzing whenever it passed over metal. When that happened, we would dig a small circular hole until we found the metal. We spent three classes repeating this process, and at the end of it, we had covered approximately half of the school forest. We collected a variety of objects, such as a golf club, nails, screws, and construction materials. Since the majority of what we found was old metal wire, we decided to use these wire to spell "garbage Can". For the background of our art, we wanted to maintain the theme of recycling materials, so we decided to make the background out of scrap wood.
Step Two: Bending the Metal and Cutting Wood
Using pliers, we cut the metal wire to the right size, and then shaped them into letters using pliers and our hands. We then arranged the letters on a piece of wood to see how much wood we needed, and marked and cut it to size.
Step Three: Staining and Sanding the Wood
After cutting the wood, we stained it and left it overnight to dry. The next day, we brought the pieces of wood to the shop to be sanded down. By pressing each piece to the sander for about 5 minutes, our pieces of wood became incredibly smooth and polished. The wood we used was wood from the European buckthorn, an invasive tree species that is harmful to native ecosystems.
Step Four: Putting the Wood and Metal Together
The final step was to assemble the entire thing, and we did this by stapling each letter into place and hammering the staples in to ensure that that the letters stayed secure. To attach the pieces of wood together, we drilled two holes into the wood and inserted metal rods to connect the two pieces of wood. We glued the holes to secure the rods into the holes
The Final Product
As a group we decided to spell out the phrase "Garbage Can" as a play on words. In Green Industries we believe that there is no such thing as garbage, that everything can be reused in some way.We believe that "Garbage Can" be used for art and other purposes and shouldn't just be thrown away. It shows that garbage can be much more than just garbage. The word garbage is often used as a derogatory term for being useless. In this project we showed that "Garbage" can be used for many more things instead of just ending up in a landfill. Projects like these are a great way to display the variety of uses for scrap metal, while at the same time helping to clean up the environment.