Knox Box of Miscellany

Dawn Knox – A rearranger of words into something hopefully meaningful…

WEEE! The Throw Away Culture – #MuseItUp #DaffodilAndTheThinPlace

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The WEEE Man at the Eden Project, Cornwall

The WEEE Man at the Eden Project, Cornwall

Yesterday, I thought about people who care enough for our historical heritage that they give up time and money or use their skills. I mentioned that some people refer to our ‘throw-away culture’ and here is a photo that shows the sort of things we throw away. It is known as the WEEE Man, where WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. At a height of seven metres, it consists of items that are often discarded, such as white goods and computer hardware. I found the following information about the sculpture from the Eden Project website (which you can find here ) that “Mobile phones, mp3 players, lawn mowers and the like make up his bones and sinews; his teeth are computer mice; his ears are satellite dishes; and his brain is built from computer parts.”

If you would like to find out exactly what the WEEE Man is made of, you can find an infographic here. The artist, Paul Bonomini says: “I designed him to look like he’s dragging himself out of landfill, coming back from the dead. He’s there to remind us of this monster that we’re creating when we dump these goods rather than recycle them.”

It’s rather disturbing to think that the items in the WEEE Man are more or less what one household gets through in a lifetime.

I sometimes wonder what people from previous centuries would say to us if they could fast forward to 2014. How would they consider we’d cared for the world they’d known?

At St. Nicholas Church, Laindon with Dunton, Essex, we are trying to renovate and upkeep a building that has been in existence since the thirteenth century. If you’d like to help us to raise money for renovation and maintenance of St. Nicholas church, please purchase a copy of the ebook ‘Daffodil and the Thin Place’. All profits from the ebook, which costs approximately £1.80, will go towards the fund. You can obtain a copy here from the Muse It Up Publishing website or from any major ebook seller. #MuseItUp #DaffodilAndTheThinPlace

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