The Rise of "Rejasing"

The U.S. has come a long way since Ben Franklin preached thrift and New Englanders saved everything from string to scraps of cloth for patchwork quilts. In frugal foreign eyes, 20th century Americans are stupendous wasters: a people so rich that they think no more of tearing down 30-year-old skyscrapers than of tossing beer cans out car windows. Now a turnabout seems at hand. Goaded to recycle the nation's mounting garbage, individuals as well as industries have spotted new charms in old discards--cans, bottles, light bulbs. Thousands of Americans are enjoying an effort that bears the acronymic description "rejase"--"re-using junk as something else."

Bathtub Sofas. "I pick up usable trash," says Hugo Mesa, a commercial designer in Los Angeles. "It's all potential pollution." In his hands, a discarded beer barrel becomes a leather-slung chair, old railroad ties turn into thick benches, tin cans take on new life as lamps. "Salvaged waste has value," agrees George Korper, proprietor of the Eco-Center store in Greenwich, Conn., which sells things like telephone-cable spools as $2 patio tables. Going one better, Mrs. Jerrald Dixon of Crown Point, Ind., makes "Old Woman in the Shoe" table centerpieces with plaster figures and her husband's worn-out Army boots.

A Los Angeles doctor takes old X-ray pictures, adds a little yarn edging and creates startling place mats. In Research Engineer Peter Gottlieb's West Los Angeles home, one child sleeps happily beneath a headboard made of bright cartons of Screaming Yellow Zonkers, a beloved popcorn product. Or consider Dr. Richard Gieser's sparkling decor in Wheaton, Ill.: his sofa is an old bathtub on legs, with one side cut away, lined with pillows. His favorite chair is another tub, upended. It has, Mrs. Gieser says, "a nestlike quality."

Aspiring rejasers can find ample tips in books like Joan Ranson Shortney's How to Live on Nothing (Pocket Books; 95-c-), which includes a 100-item check list for transforming everyday discards. A light bulb, for instance, makes a handy sock-darning egg. With blackboard paint, an old window shade becomes a roll-up chalkboard for children. By nailing upturned bottle caps to a board, the kids can make a front-door footscraper. These days, rejasers even dump junked cars neatly offshore: the hulks act like coral reefs, attracting fish--and fishermen.

Though orange crates make adequate cupboards and aluminum-can pull-tabs can be joined into long jangly curtains, there is a definite limit to the practical re-use of junk. Beyond that point, people invent "junque" art. At the Whole Earth Marketplace in Encino, Calif., eggbeaters plus scraps of waste metal become amusingly stylized model helicopters. New York Literary Agent Peter Matson unabashedly makes collages of stained rags, and paints multishaped polyurethane packing crates, which he duly frames and hangs. "It is a creative act," he says. "It also seems a way to make technology work for me rather than vice versa."

One Man's Trash. FORTUNE Art Director Walter Allner sees the everyday detritus of a consumer society in a different light: "I have such respect for the engineers and designers who spend literally hundreds of hours designing products and their packaging that I want to extend the usefulness of things." Allner's Manhattan apartment is full of intriguing results. Crushed tin cans have become fancy wall friezes; a broken wine bottle is redesigned as a stunning rose vase; and huge clusters of beer bottles are glued together to make abstract sculptures. On one wall, a shadow-box assemblage of coffee-can keys and lead wine labels forms a witty collage of "medals"--a spoof on Allner's many legitimate art prizes. Other elegant murals and sculptures turn out, on inspection, to be composed of Styrofoam egg cartons and packing materials that Allner particularly admires. "Besides," he wryly adds, "the foam looks better than the cracked plaster behind it."

The biggest benefit of rejasing is that virtually indestructible objects never reach the garbage heap. The first grade at the Driscoll School in Brookline, Mass., for example, is building a sculpture from Clorox bottles, makeup cases and other plastic objects. "It is an excellent material for outdoor use," says Teacher Mrs. Donald Shelby, "for the same reason that it is difficult to recycle." Whatever all this says about the future of art, it surely proves that in an ecology-minded era, one man's trash is another's treasure.

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