A week ago Ideals Matter participated in the 2010 World Day (Maailmapäev in Estonian) celebration. The event takes place every year in Tallinn on the 22nd of May and it is mainly aimed to open people's mind to other cultures of the world, though this year the chosen theme was "Climate Change" and that meant a perfect opportunity for us to participate in it.Take a look at the main website to read more information about it (beware that most of it is in Estonian).
Click on the picture to watch the video made by the people from Bioneer (part of it in Estonian part of it in English)
One of our team's core principles is to walk the talk and we are proud to say that our stand was made from bottom to top considering the three Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle!
The Oil memorial is a reminder of our consumerist behavior and our dependence on oil. It displayed different daily use products such as pens, razors, dolls and tooth brushes that most people happily expect it to disappear from the earth as soon as they put it in the trash bin, when in reality it may take 1000 years for these products to completely degrade. A cool thing about the memorial is that we had to build what we now call "The transportable shelf", made out of some cardboard boxes and newspapers that were available at home, together with paint and glue to make it stronger and reusable.
The maquette was a way to connect the dots since it seems to be difficult in our global society to achieve this every time we buy something, considering the source material could have been extracted in Africa, assembled in China and sold in America. So how did we do it? we made a small version of each one of the problems related to extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal, and we pinpointed each one of them in some of the places in the world where it happens.
The trash sorting was made in a simple way: different types of trash in a box + bags labeled with the different options available for sorting in Estonia. This allowed people to learn a little bit more about the importance of recycling, how to do it and what are the available options locally. Lastly, the workshop on how to make handbags out of used clothes. In a couple of hours we showed people how that old baggy shirt, that was about to end up in the trash bin, can be transformed in a cool handbag.
After a long but beautiful and sunny day, the event was a success and the feeling was all over the place. We managed to reach people, specially children, in a fun way and at the same time we didn't trash the world with unnecessary giveaways ;)
