Kickstarter

After cleaning over 175,000 pounds of litter across more than 2,600 miles, Pick Up America is in Denver! Fresh off a successful trip through Utah and Nevada, we are coordinating two eco-art projects in the greater Denver area this summer. We are building a Peace on EarthBench and also a farm stand using re-purposed and natural building materials. Both the bottle brick bench and farm stand will be used locally and featured in a Pick Up America interpretive dance performance. We're using kickstarter to offset the cost of materials for these eco-art projects and to feed the artists at work.

We pick up tons of trash along our coast-to-coast journey, and somewhere along the way, we found a niche for turning litter into intriguing Community Eco-Art. Check out our newest ideas for the Denver area! 

Denver's First Peace on Earthbench

We've teamed up with fellow eco-activists Neambe and Ietef Vita from Going Green, Living Bling as well as YouthBiz to build a Peace on Earthbench, AKA a bottle brick bench, at an emerging community garden in the historic Five Points neighborhood in Denver. This bench will involve community youth to pick up trash and work collaboratively to create a lasting expression for sustainability in their home neighborhood.

This type of bench is unique in design and structure in that it keeps to a form of natural building while diverting around one hundred of pounds of litter that would otherwise go into a landfill. The foundation is made of earth bags, abandoned concrete slabs, river rocks, and gravel. The back of the bench is built up by scaffolding vertical layers of bottle bricks which are 20 oz bottles stuffed to the brim with other plastic litter. The outer layer is composed of a natural cement called cob which is a mixture of sand, clay, and straw. On top of all of this, we create a beautiful mosaic using broken ceramics placed into an earthen plaster. In every layer of this Earthbench, we are re-purposing once carelessly discarded litter to a productive community function that makes beautiful public art from what was previously plastic pollution. 

Check out the video about the awesome bottle brick bench we built in Moab this past March!

Please join Pick Up America and Going Green Living Bling on June 23rd as we celebrate the groundbreaking of the new community garden and begin construction on the Peace on Earthbench. 

Materials (recycled lumber, sand, gravel, nails, screws, roofing material): $1000

The Weight of Consumption: A Dance Performance for American Stewardship

PUA Alumni and PhD Choreography student Kelly Klein is returning to help us create a dance performance piece with the accompaniment of some local horn players, a bass player, and.. of course... our fabled Recycled Peace Drum. The 25-minute dance will explore the inter-connectivity of people and nature in contrast to the dark undercurrents stemming from American consumption. The dance will be performed on July 6th in the parking lot of Denver Open Media Project during the First Fridays Artwalk. We are seeking additional venues in the area for the week of the 4th of July and plan to produce a complete video of the dance.

Transport of drum from Kansas City: $300

Coffee Cup Commerce Counter

What to do with 1,000 slightly malformed plastic to-go coffee mugs? Give them to the trash artists, of course! We will create a mobile farm stand out of these coffee mugs to use as a central prop in our dance performance, The Weight of Consumption. As with the bottle brick methodology used in the Earthbench, we will be using these travel mugs as a space to divert a large volume of plastic non-decomposable, non-recyclable waste.

Materials (glue, wood, wheels): $200

Feed the Trash Artists!

Our 12 full-time volunteers + regional Denver volunteers will be working on these projects non-stop for 3 weeks. That's over 756 meals! We are asking for a financial contribution to help with food costs. Help out with the big bread bill!

Food: $1000