7 May 2023 5:57pm

The other day, I had a really interesting chat with my brother (@troykrusz) about ‘the underbelly’ of things… He is exploring underbellies through his music and lyrics and I am through these BADC projects.

*mini rant warning*

The ‘zero waste’ movement is undoubtedly one of those things with an underbelly. Sure there are ‘eco-friendly’ things we can do to make reductions, but the waste we produce as humans is somewhat inevitable in 2023. Not to mention the class-based implications around which ‘green’ options are affordable and to whom, how ‘green’ they debatably are, and the glamourised societal perceptions of ‘reuse’ and ‘upcycling’ by upper class folks as compared with lower/middle class folks.

There is also a big problem with putting the responsibility on consumers (particularly women, who are statistically the ones running households and more likely to be looking for sustainable options/putting in the domestic labour that those choices sometimes require.) Seems that the best we can do is pressure corporations and governments to make the policy changes that need to happen to address excess waste and overconsumption (particularly by manufacturers themselves). But that still leaves us asking … WTF do we do in the meantime?

Sure, sometimes there is not much left to do with something other than send it to landfill (and sometimes we simply don’t have the time or energy to do anything else with it), but the more we can think about the items we use as *earth’s resources*, maybe we can get more

 —>*imaginative*<— 

about how to make the most of them.

For example: 

Did you know that the ‘mistinted’ paint in the clearance sections of hardware shops and piled up behind the counters of paint shops, if not sold, gets put in a dumpster and sent to landfill …?! That means that we painstakingly extract oil from the earth, harming land, air, and water systems in the process, which negatively impacts human and ecological health, use fossil fuel energy to convert it into the ingredients/mixture we know as latex paint, store it in a container also developed from these processes and then LITERALLY throw it in a pile of trash — on top of the earth it was extracted from... for no reason… other than that the colour wasn’t *just right*. And we do this with SO MANY things. What if instead, there was a more beneficial exchange between retailers and consumers? What if instead, there were fewer ‘mistints’ in the first place?

Think of all the walls and furniture and art projects that could be ‘sponsored’ by those wasted paint resources…! To me, these are the underbelly systems and processes that have inspired BADC and are what I feel passionate about exploring and advocating for change. Ideally, before this big, beautiful, generous earth of ours decides she’s done f🍃🍃🍃ing around with our shenanigans (if she hasn’t already…)

Let me know what you think about developing a partnership between artists and paint supply stores in Magandjin / Brisbane… if there’s enough interest maybe it’s possible to make it happen ?