Hello, my name is Carolyn Butts. I'm here with my partner Hans Honegger.
Thank you for inviting us to join you at this table to tell you about our experience in exposing value in waste materials. I believe that this is how we will change our minds about garbage.
I'm an artist with a business degree, and I would like to show you how we apply art and design to turn waste into profit. It is in this pursuit that we have been a witness to the cycle of consumption and the industries that mitigate and support it.
In 1990, a massive tire fire at Hagersville, Ontario woke me up to our waste crisis. Some of you may remember the footage of black smoke drifting for kilometres over a mountain of burning tires for 17 days. It was my call to action and my immediate response was to take my own used car tires and turn them into art. This tragic event ignited my imperative to search for value in discarded materials.
In 2005, restoration architect Hans Honegger and I joined creative forces together in rural Ontario, located between Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal. Together we own and operate Bon Eco Design, a small but growing business in Tamworth, north of Napanee. In Tamworth, we found an affordable historic building stock to restore and renovate at a pace that we could keep. The vacated Tamworth hardware store became our home and workshop.
We named our business Bon Eco Design, an ecological twist on the famous Bon Echo Park close by. With this reference, we understood we were setting a standard to consider our iconic Canadian wilderness when making business decisions. To this end, our design business makes material matter.
We have dedicated the past 13 years to researching, sourcing, educating ourselves, and transforming waste into valuable art and design products while changing perceptions on the concept of waste. Here are a few examples of our work.
This is a tire art piece commissioned by Eastman Chemical Company in Tennessee.