What do you visualize when you think about Earth Day? Do you visualize food growing in a field, recycling containers, compost piles? The positive initiatives that have grown out of the movement? Or, do you visualize environmental assaults like the BP oil spill, factory farming, smog hanging over a city? Because of our business, maybe you picture wasted food, a full dumpster…a landfill.
There’s a saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” which, sadly, puts a positive spin on throwing things away. I bet the folks in this video would trade the trash, and the ensuing treasures, for lives without poverty and pollution. But watch what they’ve done to lift up their voices through their instruments – instruments made with forks, spoons, bottle caps, oil cans – which together form “The Recycled Orchestra.”

About Landfill Harmonic: The world generates about a billion tons of garbage a year. Those who live with it and from it are the poor – like the people of Cateura, Paraguay. And here they are transforming it into beauty. Landfill Harmonic follows the orchestra as it takes its inspiring spectacle of trash-into-music around the world.

On this Earth Day (and Earth Week), may we commit to lives that involve less trash.