As part of the arts strategy which I developed for Alumno's Pershore Junction building in Birmingham, I was keen to commission sculpture which had a material link to Birmingham's history as a centre for jewellery making and also the local areas industrial history where nearby rolling mills made copper and brass products.
Russell Coleman created jewel-like gilded sculpture with recycled stone and also made the poetry panels for Casey Bailey's commissioned poem with a combination of recycled blast furnace slag and brass letters.
Russell said:
Total Wasters is a carbon negative concrete, aggregated with waste plastic and glass. The concept was driven by a desire to find creative solutions to pressing environmental issues.
Born out of a creative arts workshop experiment, Total Wasters takes one set of problems to solve another. The use of primary sourced sand and aggregate within concrete production dramatically increases the carbon footprint of the material. We have looked to utilise waste plastics and glass from recycling centres to provide an alternative to carbon heavy aggregates needed in concrete production. In turn we have found a home for problematic post recycling waste plastic fibres and low-grade glass cutlet which would otherwise have been incinerated or left in landfill. Total wasters uses industrial by product cement alternatives as a binder to further reduce the carbon footprint. In the case of the Pershore Junction project we have used Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag or GGBS. The sculpture bases and poem plaques have used over 2 ton of waste bottle bank glass and and ground slag from steel production, 100kg of waste polypropylene and polyethene that are the “tailings” or unrecycleable waste from a plastics recycling plant.
This unique, terrazzo inspired, concrete locks waste away in plain sight, serving as a reminder that our rubbish doesn’t simply disappear once thrown in the bin.
