Our customers
The Reverse Garbage warehouse is a regular haunt for home renovators and builders, teachers, artists, set designers, gardeners, craftspeople and just plain bargain hunters.
Lots of people look for materials for their houses – shelving, noticeboards, furniture-making and garden materials. There is always interest in props and bizarre merchandising stock. A giant bookworm was snapped up for decorating a library and that’s a better option than landfill.
Sculptors are always after interesting metal shapes, timber offcuts and foam while printmakers pounce on perspex pieces. Other artists, designers, craftspeople, film-makers and performing arts professionals hunt materials for montage, collage, installation, wearable art, interior design, mosaics and prop-making. Quilters look for cotton fabrics and scrapbookers are interested in the paper and card.
Environmental education is integral to our work, so we are pleased to host visits from teachers and students. Teachers from kindergarten to university level regularly bring student groups to Reverse Garbage for talks on waste minimisation and the creative re-use of industrial discards. We find that students experience the warehouse as an inspiring place to be.
Interesting customers
Every couple of months, we feature one of our interesting customers on our noticeboard and in our newsletter Not J*nk Mail.
This month, we feature Durba. While some people might find making the jump from systems’ analyst to vegetarian café owner a considerable one, she said that her desire to live a life she truly believes in meant that it was simple.
“I was an aspiring yuppie!” Durba laughs, explaining that while she was on the road to undertaking her MBA, she started to meditate and became a vegetarian. She learnt how to cook by assisting with food preparation after weekend-long meditation workshops.
Over time, Durba became interested in showing people “…how vegetarian food could be really good and interesting”. This inspired the opening of My Heart Garden in Hawken Drive, St Lucia, six months ago.
A philosophy of re-use means that Durba can regularly be found fossicking around Reverse Garbage for items she can put into use in her café. A decorated cardboard barrel is now used by customers to drop off used plastic bags, which in turn are used by other customers for their take-away meals. Timber and plastic offcuts have been transformed into street signage and menu boards. Tiles are used to rest meal signs on.
If possible, nothing is wasted if it can be re-used. Even food scraps get collected by a local resident who feeds them to his ducks. It would seem that the aspirations of My Heart Garden to be a tranquil and meditative sanctuary works for local animals as well as its human customers.