pie-man.com - inelegantly wasted

inelegantly wasted

This is an easy one. We just recycle loads of the stuff we used to throw away. If you order a T-shirt from us, for example, you'll usually find it arrives in a recycled envelope. In the city, at least, it's pretty easy to recycle stuff these days, although admittedly space by our back door is becoming hard to come by.

Magazines, newspapers, junk mail, bottles, jars, cans, phone books, plastic containers. You know the list, everybody knows the list. Sadly there's no facility for recycling cellophane pie wrappers yet, or indeed foil pie cases, but these things take time. We consumers are driving the market, so if everyone eats bucketloads of pies the recycling companies will eventually have to sit up and take note.

We send our old clothes, games, books, toys and assorted gubbins to Oxfam. There's a branch in North Shields that even takes electrical items, so we gave them our old computer. It only takes a second to consider whether someone might have a use for whatever you're about to chuck in the bin, and therefore eventually into a landfill site. A bloke near us makes large and impressive wishing wells out of squashed Guinness cans, for example. Takes all sorts.

Oh, and we really love the shoe tree. Near where pie-man towers used to be is possibly the best example of genuinely spontaneous public art in the world. When people here wear out a pair of shoes, they tie the laces together and throw the shoes up into the branches of a particular tree in Heaton Park. Nobody can remember why. The powers that be keep deciding that a load of old shoes in a tree is not what they want in their shiny sophisticated city, and taking the shoes down. And the people of the city just pick a different tree and start again.