Louise Nason Phillips, Recycling Effort Founder, Dies at 54

Louise Nason Phillips, a nationally known specialist on recycling and the creative reuse of materials, died last week at her home in La Jolla after a lengthy battle with breast cancer. She was 54.

Phillips founded the San Diego Materials Bank, a one-woman operation that collected unwanted or unused materials from manufacturing plants and businesses and gave them new life--an endeavor she considered vital in an era of retrenchment.

Phillips used the same principle in earlier years in a program she conducted for the San Francisco Art Commission called SCRAP. SCRAP sent its confiscated collection of other people’s trash to nonprofit corporations--schools, arts organizations and community agencies.

Phillips once told an interviewer that the waste of otherwise reusable materials distressed her terribly. She spoke of taking parcels of 60-inch zippers and passing them on to the Old Globe Theatre for Shakespearean productions.

She said she dreamed of taking mismatched or mis-dyed paint that a business intended to pour down the drain and using it to spruce up a fence at a small college. She talked of taking cabinets headed for a company’s scrap pile and using them for museum display cases.

As Phillips once wrote in a prospectus outlining the San Diego Materials Bank: “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 Phillips often explained, no one should throw anything away before at least offering it to her. It could save somebody, she said--at a time when money for the arts and social services is scarce.

Victoria Hamilton, executive director of the Commission for Arts and Culture for the city of San Diego, said she had known of Phillips’ work in San Francisco, where SCRAP “was the model for other such programs around the country.”

Said Hamilton: “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.”

A long-time art instructor, Phillips had once served as exhibit coordinator at the San Diego Museum of Natural History and was a 1989 graduate of LEAD, Inc., a leadership-training organization in San Diego.

A memorial service for Phillips will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at All Hallows Catholic Church in La Jolla.