My son's elementary school recently assigned a recycling project to all the grade levels as part of a school-wide environmental initiative. Needless to say, I'm stoked! We brainstormed a bit about the project a few nights ago, considering the only parameter of the project: make something cool out of our trash/recyclables. Easy enough.
Well, our garbage is fairly minimal (patting self on the back right now), so we looked to our recycling bin. We basically found cardboard food packaging, some junk mail, a few catalogs and a small pile of design magazines (I'm hopelessly addicted to them, despite the paperless e-versions now available). We recently made a giant, wall-mounted, 3D relief of our solar system completely out of found items already in our home (although sawing a handball in half for two of the planets was much harder than I had anticipated!), so I knew we could come up with a project requiring that we use only our trash. With paper recyclables being our only resource, we set on our sites on weaving up some boxes and baskets from them, as found in this crafty re-use project. Actually, I snipped and weaved experimentally myself for a bit and then thought "someone must have already figured out how to do this" and hopped online, delighted to find this wonderful how-to on Craft Stylish. We'll post the results here sometime next week.