Her Dream Gives New Meaning to Recycling--of Almost Anything

Louise Phillips wants something done about trash. She wants to confiscate it, dust it off and use it again.

She wants to take parcels of surplus 60-inch zippers and give them to the Old Globe Theatre for Shakespearean productions.

She dreams of taking mismatched or mis-dyed paint that a business intends to pour down the drain and using it to spruce up a fence at a small college.

She wants to take cabinets headed for a company’s scrap pile and use them for museum display cases.

Phillips has either done these things or dreams of doing them in San Diego, where last year she founded the San Diego Materials Bank. The bank, at the moment, is a one-woman operation. Its office is Phillips’ kitchen table in La Jolla.

Founded SCRAP

This 50-year-old woman describes herself as a “recycling and secondary-materials consultant.” She used to live in San Francisco, where she founded SCRAP, an affiliate of the San Francisco Art Commission.

SCRAP collected unwanted or unused materials from manufacturing plants and businesses and gave them new life. It sent them on to nonprofit corporations--schools, arts organizations or community agencies such as United Way--where the receipt of such “trash” saved thousands of dollars.

Phillips would like to do the same thing here.

In a prospectus describing the San Diego Materials Bank, she writes: “Why is resource reuse needed? Landfill is no place to put usable supplies for arts, education and social service programs, yet a vast amount of clean, new or reusable materials and equipment goes to our shrinking landfill space daily.

“As inflation continues to shrink community services budgets, these materials become increasingly hard to obtain. Through membership in the materials bank, schools, theaters, day-care facilities, museums, arts programs and homeless services would have access to clean supplies diverted from landfill.”

An elaborate example of SCRAP’s handiwork in San Francisco involved flour being swept off the floor of a bakery and used in the making of a model for one of the most striking pieces of bronze sculpture ever constructed in the city by the bay.

As far as Phillips is concerned, nothing ought to be thrown away before the materials bank can get its hands on it. It might save somebody money--in an era when money for the arts and social services is precious. As Phillips sees it, it puts a whole new slant on creativity.

Victoria Hamilton is executive director of the Commission for Arts and Culture for the City of San Diego.

“I think it’s a terrific idea,” Hamilton said of the materials bank. “I was aware of Louise back in the mid-’70s, when she was involved with SCRAP. SCRAP was considered the model for other such groups around the country.

In Needed of Space

“They were able to take items that businesses or corporations thought of as sheer garbage and make it available to artists in the community and to schools and nonprofit groups that wouldn’t have gotten such things any other way.”

The lumber used on the set of the Appalachian-based “Heathen Valley,” now playing at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, might have been culled, for example, from the scrap heaps of local lumber yards. Hamilton said a parade chief, in need of materials for costumes and floats, could give Phillips a call and have half the battle won right away.

The problem is, Phillips needs a warehouse for her dreams. She needs a place with a cargo door and a fence circling a minimum of 8,000 square feet to hold any surplus she digs up. If she got a call from a lumber yard wanting to donate half its merchandise tomorrow, she would have no place to put it.

She would have to tell them no.

As a result, the materials bank is little more than a telephone exchange at the moment. You call in, saying you have 10,000 gallons of paint; she puts you in touch with a group or an agency that can use it. What she would like is an in-between point to store the stuff.

In San Francisco, SCRAP used a pier with 27,000 square feet. The success of SCRAP later spawned the Bay Area Creative Re-Use effort, which supplied not only schools but also Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts throughout the San Francisco Bay Area with materials for projects.

SCRAP itself was later scrapped, a victim of funding woes in this era of retrenchment. Meanwhile, Phillips was going through her own changes. She remarried and moved to San Diego more than a year ago, and was amazed that the city had no program remotely similar to SCRAP.

Loves to Tell Stories

“England is roughly the size of California,” Phillips said, “and has at least 40 such programs. At this point, they’re way ahead of us.”

Phillips has spent most of the past year making herself known among local agencies, as well as officials of the county’s Solid Waste Management Department. She believes waste can be put to miraculous uses, or re uses. She once taught a course at Stanford University called “Waste: Problem or Resource?”

A tall, impeccably organized woman, with a masters in fine arts and a diamond certificate from the Gemological Institute of America, Phillips loves to tell stories about her work. She tells of one SCRAP-like agency taking large shards of ugly plastic, complete with metalized fins, and making them the primary decorations for a New York street festival.

As she puts it, why have broken crockery, when you can turn it around and make it community sculpture?