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Outside of Rio de Janeiro lies Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill, where 3,000 "catadores" make their living foraging for recyclables among the garbage. In Waste Land, a documentary that opens in U.S. theaters this week, director Lucy Walker chronicles a project by Brazil-born, Broooklyn-based artist Vik Muniz, who returned to his homeland to create portraits of the catadores made from......read more
Lighten Up, our first original web series, chronicles bands taking part in the cultural shift toward sustainability. The series kicks off with The Honey Brothers (featuring SHFT's own Adrian Grenier on drums), followed by Brandi Carlile, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and Dave Matthews Band. Lighten Up is produced in partnership with Stonyfield Farm....read more
Nature, waste, design, and tech collide in One Hundred and Eight, an interactive installation made by German designer Nils Volker. Consisting of ordinary household garbage bags mounted on a wall, the display's elements are selectively inflated and deflated by a two colling fans behind. "Although each plastic bag is mounted stationary the sequences of inflation and deflation create the......read more
Brooke Baxter and Rolyn Hu are Brooklyn's cultural impresarios. The duo own and operate both Glasslands Gallery and the Manhattan Inn, two of the borough's meccas for music, art and food. They're also way into sustainability. Both spaces are built from salvaged materials and include loads of interesting nuances, such as repurposed doorknobs as tap handles, and school desks as......read more
Nick Gentry's floppy disk paintings are musings on throwaway culture and technological change. The London artist assembled this video of his work, scored by a track from UK beat maestro, Burial. From Nick's artist's statement: "Since graduating from Central St Martins in 2006, the focus has been to explore how technological advancement is affecting society. Throughout history,......read more
Over the past twelve years, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang have collected several tons of plastic debris on a small stretch of beach near their northern California home. The pieces of plastic are cleaned, categorized, and sorted, before the couple goes to work transforming the garbage into beautiful pieces of art. This short doc profiles the couple and their creative output and......read more
Tom Szaky is the quintessential eco-entrepreneur. While a freshman at Princeton, Szaky founded a company that recycles garbage into plant fertilizer, then packages it in discarded soda bottles. Fast forward five years, and TerraCycle Plant Food is available in every Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, and more than 3000 other locations. Today, TerraCycle is finding new uses for trash, creating products......read more
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the state of the environment should be driving innovation around the world. And indeed it is. In our new series "The Big SHFT: 10 Innovators Changing Our World," we team up with Ford Motor Company to profile leading innovators who are shaping new sustainable businesses and influencing positive change around the world. Executive produced by SHFT......read more
If there was a hall of fame for sustainable business, Dr. Mike Biddle would be one its first inductees. Twenty years ago, the trailblazing plastics engineer launched MBA Polymers in his garage. He was determined to prove that complex polymers from consumer plastics could be recycled into useful raw materials. Mike developed a patented series of techniques for separating and refining plastic waste......read more
Feeling a little down about the state of the planet? Here's a two-minute slice of techno-optimism for you. Filmmaker Michael Marantz assembled "The Future Is Ours" from a bunch of clips he found on the net, and the result is this stirring tribute to the people pushing humanity ahead into the future. According to Marantz, "We need to be inspired by the immense possibilities of the future and......read more
