I think I'm framing this as a guest blog post.  I want to use this space to add my thoughts to this project, in a somewhat random and unsorted way, with some comments and some questions and some ideas.  This is getting really rambly, and I'm sorry about that....

do you have a plant species chosen?

do you have a planter design? 

what material are you planning to use for the planters? 

how small/big are they each going to be?

Is there existing research on plants being used as sound walls, and an existing design to use as a starting point?

What I see here is a potential for the planters, plants, soil, etc. to all be media, and I think that's huge. Ultimately I think what can make all these trash things really transformative is when trash becomes media.   I define media as physical matter which has information encoded in it which makes sense to people.  It is the physical form of language. And I define language to be very generally any structure we impose on the world which has meaning to other people. 

The reason I am taking the time here to talk about the definition of language is that I think it's useful to use the term "language" as a much larger conceptual container than people generally do.  I think architecture is a language and buildings are media, microchip layout and circuit layout are a language and circuits are media, machine design drawings are a language and machines are media, Agriculture is a language and farms are media, etc. 

What we are trying to do with trash magic is simply to create languages which we can use to make trash do express things according to our will. 

One thing I've thought about a bunch in the past is the idea of using a plant in a planter as the physical form that a music fan pays a musician for.  In the age of digital information, the physical media to store a song has zero marginal cost since there are free servers which store songs and everyone already has a client which stores songs.  So what if instead of buying a record or tape or CD, a music fan paid a musician for a planter with living things in it?  The fan pays the musician money, but the musician doesn't provide the plant.  Nor do they pay for it. The plants flow into the music system for free, then flow back out for free, but the movement of them stimulates a payment between fan and musician. 

So imagine the following situation.  Businesses pay releaf or a similar company to get all their cardboard and wood waste picked up, as well as organic waste like sawdust. Releaf coordinates with a musician who sells tickets to shows and also song downloads, volunteers assemble the planters using the waste streams and replicate living things into them.  These living things are all in a self-replicating state, where worms breed worms, fungi make more fungi, plants make more plants, the nutrients to grow them all come from waste streams, and the labor is all volunteer from the fan base of the musician.  Volunteers are taught how to do the operations required to make all this by other volunteers who are a fixed set of experts recruited for the various sub-tasks, like composting, vermiculture, carpentry, etc. This creates a flow of the plants in planters, which can then be flash-mob style deployed to a live music gig, and used for a backdrop as proposed.  That can then become a quasi-fixed piece of infrastructure, on private property, which has value to the property owner who is also hosting the gig.  As more gigs happen around town, a network is built up and plants can flow from one place to another and build up more and more green walls in more and more places.  The bigger it gets the more significant engineering tasks can be looked at, like covering a whole structure and using it for cooling, large scale landscaping and so on. 

These installations have value.  So you can make money by providing the service of organizing the construction and taking the trash out, but as media infrastructure they cost nothing to both the fans and the musicians.  And then the same is true of the web servers.  if you can take computers from waste streams and make web servers from them and put music on those, that's negative cost web infrastructure. 

And that's what is needed to create a truly free network!  A network with negative marginal cost.  My belief is that if you can make a system which has negative marginal cost to scale and which contains the means of its own replication, that this will very quickly escalate.  When a normal business wants to expand it needs access to capital to do that. When an entity can scale by someone just doing a  small simple thing and that thing makes money(or saves money), and no one owns any property which inhibits replication, it can EXPLODE! it can out-grow any system which requires capital to grow.  This is why it's so important to work on structuring the system in a way which both can be profitable at the level of a single small piece of trash with a sharpie marker on it representing a single song and also at the level of billions of planters shaping whole cityscapes. 

This is  very tricky! This is not capitalism. It is existing right on the boundary of capitalism, and feeds off of it, uses the dynamics of capitalism, but isn't contained within it. 

Anyway, I like what's happening here, and I'd like to find ways to support it in any way I can, and to replicate it to Denver as well.  That will be an interesting exercise in replication, finding a person to replicate each role you have there in Austin.  That's part of how I think replication will work, building teams of people who can themselves be replicated, just as public libraries copy each other's structure without one super library being the owner of the franchise.  Denver and Austin have a lot in common.  Also I have a connection to the company here that's already doing the pickup part, so replicating your system here will only require connecting the dots from them to the other elements of the set like composting(which I also have a connection at) and gardening and music. 

All this is part of what I think Buckminster Fuller was talking about when he used the word "ephemeralization". A thing is being created, a big thing, but it is ephemeral. It is a new set of structures being encoded into existing flows of energy, information, and materials. It is new social structures built into existing ones.  No new factory needs to be built, or even a bunch of people hired.  Information is restructured.  It is very ephemeral!

Another thing I'd like to add is that for container gardening, I think it makes sense to open up the waste stream to every container you can think of and reach out to the business community to make that clear: bottles, boxes, cans, jugs, tanks, barrels.  If something has toxic sludge in it, partner with the mycoremediation people to get the right fungus to clean it up. 

This is great stuff! can't wait to see where it goes!  And sorry this got so rambly. 

Also, i have some specific thoughts about how the cardboard cubes I've been making can be stacked on a wall, but I need to tinker with it more.

-Trash Robot