Weekend festival sports green living.
PORT GAMBLE — To Poulsbo Elementary students in Kathy Leddon’s classroom, trash is art.
Before the school year let out, students constructed three murals of the earth — spanning from today’s polluted conditions to a cleaner future — with everyday trash to enter this weekend’s contest at the Great Peninsula Future Festival in Port Gamble.
The trash art contest, open to children and adults, encourages participants to create whatever art form they can think of with clean, sanitary trash materials that would otherwise be recycled or thrown away.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most current report (2006) Americans generate 251 million tons of trash that year — 4.6 pounds per person every day.
In comparison, Americans recycled 1.5 pounds of waste, totaling 82 million tons — equivalent to the energy created by more than 10 billion gallons of gasoline. That’s 1/17 of America’s annual gasoline consumption.
“We’re producing waste products faster than nature can break them down and using up our resources faster than they can be replaced,” said festival organizer Sandra Bauer, in a press release. “The trash art contest is just one of the ways we’ll involve kids. We want to stimulate their imaginations and encourage them to think about the tons of stuff people throw away. They are the ones who will inherit the planet.”
Bauer, sister of Kitsap County Commissioner Steve Bauer, is the festival’s lead organizer. The festival is wrapped around sustainable living concepts and will host live music and entertainment. Hand-made crafts, local foods as well as green products, concepts and technology will also be on display.
Gene Bullock, another festival volunteer, is heading the trash art contest and hopes for a good turnout. All trash art entries are judged Sunday.
“We are eager to get kids to join (in the festival) and this is a wonderful way to get across to kids the fact that we throw away so much stuff. We are fill up our landfills with toys and gadgets and stuff,” he said.
Bullock said he’s already received project ideas from individuals throughout the county including a full-size salmon sculpture made from used CDs.
The idea behind it, he said, is to take photographs of the salmon’s reflecting scales, wherever it might be located on various adventure stints.
Musical instruments made out of waste materials are also expected to be on display, he said.
“I’m excited to see what turns up,” Bullock said, adding that Vehicle Research Institute students at Western Washington University are bringing a car prototype of a two-seat roadster that will get 100 miles to the gallon.
Johnathan Ides, who will also be at the festival this weekend, is the team lead of the X-Prize team responsible for the WWU prototype. He said his team is entering the vehicle into the Progressive Automotive X-Prize Competition to create an economically viable vehicle.
In the 1990s VRI competed in solar-powered car competitions in Florida and across Australia, Ides said. More recent projects include biomethane research.
“We are refining cow manure composting and using it for fuel for cars. You can actually run your vehicle on an infinitely renewable resource,” he said, adding there are already methane-powered cars in California and methane sources to keep them running.
For more information on the festival’s line up of events, live entertainment and music visit www.greatpeninsulafuturefestival.org.
