My shop really starts with my passion for the environment. I try very hard to create products designed with a zero waste lifestyle. That means I either compost things, recycle them, reuse them or upcycle them. I also try to reduce my level of consumption (especially of electronic devices, because I think they're the worst). And so much like in nature, in our household, we literally generate zero waste. It brings me great pleasure to announce that we've been doing this since mid-2017, nearly three years already! I only wish we had have started sooner!
What started my venture into the #zerowaste movement was hearing about this young girl that collected all her garbage and ended up with only one glass jam jar of waste after one whole year. And that made me stop and take a long hard look at my own lifestyle, because until then I thought I was pretty "eco". It turns out I wasn't. I dread to think about how much waste I created before. Tonnes of garbage rubbish no doubt. Tonnes!
Where we live, in Australia, we have three differently-coloured bins. Yellow is for recycling. Green is for compost. And red is for general household waste. It has been nearly 3 years since we last put the red bin out for collection. Now? It sits empty.
You know, I take this whole subject very seriously because I was trained as a materials scientist. We know better than anyone how materials are extracted from the Earth, refined, processed and ultimately sold to the unsuspecting consumer. I am very concerned about this, and the degradation of out planet. Basically, all materials, —whether they are natural or synthetic— ultimately come from natural spaces. I think people tend to forget that.
I think people in general really have to start thinking about where their materials come from and where the materials are going at the end of a product's life. Can it be disassembled for instance? Can the materials be separated and eventually sorted? Is the product even necessary or useful to begin with?
And so I thought that as a former materials scientist, if there's anyone who can do this —if anyone can do even better than that girl— it's me. And so my #zerowaste journey began. Initially I wasn't able to do it. Things invariably went into the red bin. I felt extremely guilty. I felt like a failure. So I spent a lot of time simply thinking about new creative ways to get rid of things. Weeks of thinking. Anything so long as it didn't go in the red bin. Then there was a transition period of a few months. Over time, our waste stream got smaller and smaller and smaller as I realised that natural materials were ultimately the way to go. Vayakora was born.
Today, I try to avoid plastic. Especially polyurethane (PU), PolyStyrene (PS), Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) and epoxy resin. Wherever possible. I encourage you to research more about the extraction processes used in things like resin or vinyl or precious metals.
It's more than just plastic ending up in the ocean though. It's that society has not yet arrived at a truly circular economy. I even think there should be limits on the amount of new materials that anyone can buy. Because right now, there isn't any purchasing limit on practically any raw material. If you have the money, you can get it (in any quantity). Why isn't there any information about how and where raw materials are processed? Ultimately it's the natural environment –biodiversity– that suffers. Why is it so? Why does it have to be this way?
Even so, like it or not, the human civilisation is slowly but surely entering what I call "the eco age". Except that when I go into my local hardware supplier, I realise that this idea still has not gone mainstream... yet. The good news is that I recently did a search and found several hundred zero waste shops on Etsy. I'm extremely proud to say that vayakora is among them.
I'd also like to point out that this is how my abstract art initially got started (I don't generally like abstract art). It was literally the paper I used to clean up with. Because now after I do some printmaking, when it comes to wash up my lino, or my brushes, or my rollers, or my tiles, or dealing with empty tubes of paint... all of that pigment that would otherwise go straight down the drain and into the ocean gets rinsed, collected, evaporated and reutilised.
Anything that cannot be composted or recycled gets incinerated. No that's not ideal, but we do recover and filter all of that ash to use as inorganic garden fertiliser. Although we do not produce vasy quantities of this ash, I'm still hoping to incorporate some of it into a new useful product I'm working on.
In a zero waste world, everything has its place. Everything can be reutilised. Somehow. Things like broken plates end up being crushed and used to spread on our driveway, for example. In the future I'm hoping we will be able to crush it finer for use as a new source material (filler/aggregate).
In case you're wondering, I mainly work from my desktop computer and "the shed". The shed is an outdoor 4-car garage converted into an art studio space. My shed is a tad chaotic, but well organised.
My Etsy shop allows me the freedom to work on things that are most important to me. As such I finally feel like my sense of passion, my values and my priorites are all heading towards the same end goal. To be creative with the environment always in mind.
Besides my artworks, the ultimate aim is to create new, useful products that can either be recycled and/or composted when their useful life is over. I intend to sell several different types of products on my Etsy shop:
1. Handmade art (printmaking).
2. Zero-waste products, "desktop design".
3. Digital illustration (prints).
4. Street photography (prints).
You can read more about my philosophy and ethical values on the vayakora website:
https://www.vayakora.com