Articles on how to breathe a second life into old things are becoming more and more popular in the West. In Russia, the practice is not new. Building a bird feeder out of a milk carton is a sweet thing to do. Only if «they» have this trend — entertainment, we have the inevitability. “People do this not out of economy, but because they think it’s normal to live like this,” journalist and director Elena Pogrebizhskaya is sure.
I live in a village in New Moscow. Most of all, our village looks like a large construction site, in some places we have roads, but we don’t have any amenities at all. That is, everything that the eye in Moscow does not notice, all these flower beds, lawns and even sidewalks, we do not have. But we also want to.
Somehow I was walking from a stop and looking, and the entrance to our village was decorated with six car tires. Our administrator could no longer look at the solid liquid clay in which our village is buried, and decided to put up beautiful flower beds, from tires, and then plant flowers there. I’m going to argue. What, I say, are we a motorcade, a bus depot, why are we frightened with tires?
The administrator looks at me and does not understand. And he says that if you paint it with white paint and bury it, it will be beautiful. That, they say, the neighbors pass by and everyone approves of the initiative.
And then I understand that “beautiful” is different for everyone and I don’t need to argue. From my point of view, this is absolute poverty, all these flower beds are made of painted tires, but I will not undertake to explain to those who consider this normal. Laborious.
If you walk around our neighborhood, you can collect a large collection of this «beautiful».
I see bird feeders made from milk cartons. Here someone made a mini-greenhouse from a five-liter plastic bottle, with a cut bottom, and someone nearby fenced the lawn with a multi-colored fence made of dug-in plastic soda bottles. But the star of landscape architecture is a swan carved from a tire.
And so I think, guys, why don’t you take this garbage to the trash and make a birdhouse out of wood, and a picket fence?
And you can fence a flower bed with even larger real stones or make a wattle fence from real branches, you know about that?
Perhaps, I think, people do it to save money. And now I’m asking “flower beds from tires” in the search engine. The search engine corrects me: «beds of tires.» And a hundred recipes fall on me, how to make a beautiful composition from unnecessary summer rubber.
“Each owner of a country house seeks to decorate the area adjacent to it. Buying industrial flowerpots made of concrete or plastic modules quickly solves this problem, but is accompanied by serious costs. In order to save money, you can use a step-by-step guide to create such a simple product as a do-it-yourself tire flower bed: a photo of a wheel tire flower bed and practical recommendations will help you navigate this issue.
I have a question, guys, and you, decorating the site with tires, what did you build the house on? Did you find money for it? Why do you suddenly need to save money on flowerbeds?
You don’t need to create from garbage, you don’t recycle it for humanity, you just take garbage and throw it away
A large terracotta clay pot, twice the size of a tire, cost me a thousand rubles. We agreed that I would buy some of these pots for the village, and the administrator would throw out his tires and I would never see them again. This is if about my personal history and the village.
Well, in short, everyone who plants flowers in such rubbish, is he wisely spending every thousand rubles? Now we will not talk about pensioners, but let’s talk about all the strong and normally earning men and women who did not find 100 rubles for a small plywood birdhouse and 50 rubles for a greenhouse film, but planted a milk carton and a plastic bottle in their yard. I just want to say that the economy has nothing to do with it.
People do this not out of economy, but because they believe that it is normal to live like this. Because they, regardless of income level, have poverty in their heads. Because this aunt or uncle just can’t imagine going out and buying something with their money. They would rather take something out of the garbage bag and make it “beautiful”. And the money, equivalent to a normal flower bed, is better spent on drink or cigarettes are bought for them.
Well, let’s also take into account the rogue standard reigning around. There are so many attempts to make candy out of shit, we call it “do it yourself”, so many rubber swans that it seems that this is our norm.
I even came across a whole guide on the Internet called «Creating from garbage.» A tin can turns into a jewelry box, a DVD into a curtain clip, but a rug from garbage bags and an apartment decoration from egg trays. If you think that all the authors turned out beautifully, no, it’s ugly. Just for some reason it is very difficult for people to do a simple thing. Take and throw away the garbage, get rid of the tires and put the old rims and egg cartons in the bin.
You don’t need to create from garbage, you don’t create innovations and don’t recycle it for humanity, you just take garbage and throw it away.