PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — One of the most common complaints in Philadelphia is that there’s a ton of trash on the streets.
“It’s not a trash stream, it’s a trash tsunami,” says Neil Benson.
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Back in 1991, Benson and a few of his friends started the Philadelphia Dumpster Divers, a group of found-object artists and collectors who find new uses for trash.
Today, the group has about 40 members and meets monthly to exchange junk and talk about their art.
Each artist has their own motivation for working with trash. Some aim to make a statement about sustainability, or to undo the wastefulness we see every day. For others, it’s about preserving meaningful items or simply artistic expression. We met a few of the Dumpster Divers for The Jawncast to find out why they find value in picking through trash.
Neil Benson
Benson started dumpster diving when he was in school at the Philadelphia College of Art — which later became University of the Arts. At that point, he was looking for useful items, like milk crates, that he could use as shelves. But he quickly discovered how many valuable items people throw away.
“Almost every dumpster … you want to cry,” he says, “because the amount and quality of the ‘trash’ is unsustainable. So unsustainable that I think it's going to be a large part of the collapse of our civilization.”
Benson makes various forms of art. He spent 40 years working as a photographer, and he says some of his best photo equipment has come from dumpsters.
“I standardized on a specific enlarger. Obscure, but very high quality. I forget where my first one came from, but I found my second one in a dumpster, and I used it for 40 years.”
Not everyone in the group literally digs through dumpsters, but Benson does. He’s been confronted about it a few times, but he’s never worried about the police.
“Do not worry about getting caught,” he says. “The planet will continue to spin. The sun will continue to rise. No police department in their right mind would risk a newspaper, local or citywide, with the headline, ‘Artists arrested for trash picking.’”
Ultimately, Benson’s goal is to try to keep usable items from piling up in a landfill, to help our community become more sustainable.
“Our society cannot continue to be this wasteful,” he says. “A disposable society cannot last long. And you're going to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.”
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Alden Cole
Alden Cole joined the Dumpster Divers in 2005. He’s a multi-talented artist — he paints, he’s worked in fashion design and illustration, and he makes decorative lamps.
He finds parts for his lamps out on the street or in thrift stores, or sometimes his friends will give him used lamps.
His home is an art project in itself — with paintings, lamps and figurines from floor to ceiling. He even hand-wove the fabric for his throw pillows.
"A friend a few weeks ago said, 'You know, your house is like an antidepressant,'" Cole told us. “I had never thought of it in those terms, but it is. I've created it to anti-depress myself, and it has that dual function of inspiring other people.”
For Cole, art is all about self-expression and his relationship with himself.
“I came here to study with a spiritual teacher,” he says. “I was trying to figure out why I basically disliked myself so much …. I just had too many issues with myself as a queer man. So, whatever, I made art instead.”
The spiritual teachings and art have brought him self-acceptance. Today, Cole is happy living with himself and his art, and is glad to welcome anyone into his home to see it.
“I'm sort of gallery-shy in terms of going and showing my works,” he says. “I want someone to come here and see it.”
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Joel Spivak
Joel Spivak is one of the original founders of the Dumpster Divers. He’s had the mindset of reusing things since he was a kid.
“I grew up during World War II,” he explains, “and of course, we didn’t throw anything out. We reused everything 10 times over.
“One of my first skilled jobs was my grandfather bought me a hammer to straighten nails for him. We would de-nail things, and I was to straighten the nails, and then he would reuse them to build, because you couldn't buy nails. All the material was going to the war effort.”
Spivak became an architect and a carpenter. He made furniture out of scraps from abandoned or demolished buildings. In his kitchen, almost everything is made out of old doors.
Spivak moved to South Street in the late 1960s and helped revitalize the neighborhood, building new shops and restaurants in spaces that old businesses had abandoned.
As he renovated these buildings, he started to collect the items that were left behind. He displays some of his collection in the South Street Museum, which pops up in an empty South Street storefront whenever one is available.
For Spivak, trash picking and working with junk is about preserving things that have memories attached to them — even if they’re not his memories.
“The door handles over there are from stores that were probably well over 100-year-old stores,” he says, pointing to the handles on a cabinet in his kitchen. “I'm thinking, like, how many million people touched that handle? And there's like … a spirit in the material.”
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Simone Spicer
Simone Spicer takes dumpster diving more literally than some of the others.
“I work with recycled plastics and cardboard boxes,” she says, “so my stuff is trash. It doesn't have any redeeming quality as an object.”
One of her recent works, “Plastic Galactic,” was on display at Philadelphia International Airport.
“I collected over 1,000 — probably 2,000 — bottles in the course of one month,” Spicer explains. “I made deep-space objects and spiral galaxies using transparent bottles, LED color-changing lights inside the bottles, and stretching black plastic bags to get kind of a space feeling.”
Spicer has always had a message of environmentalism in her work. When she started, she wanted to bring awareness to the issue of waste and encourage people to recycle. Now, she’s thinking bigger.
“I've watched my work kind of morph into thinking about our place, and planet Earth, and the history of humankind on Earth, and where we're going, and being okay if we're not gonna be here for thousands of years.”
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Hear more about the Philadelphia Dumpster Divers, including what happens at their meetings, on The Jawncast.