SCART®: the beautiful and useful side of waste

How do bristles from an old broom become David Bowie’s hair in a portrait of the famous cover of the “Aladdin Sane” album? How does waste from a handbag factory turn into the face of Amy Winehouse in a painting that keep her memory alive? And how do discarded PC parts (hard disk, keyboard, etc..) become the face of Nelson Mandela?

The answer is “SCART”, the original, artistic, ecological project whose scope is to bring back to life materials that become waste every day.

The project was started in 1998 by Waste Recycling – a company focused on the treatment and recovery  of industrial waste, acquired by Hera Group in 2015 – and today SCART® is a registered trademark in Italy and Europe, under which exclusive works and installations are made from 100% waste.

The project is considered to be the first Waste Art project created by a company in the world in terms of dimensions, originality and continuity over the years, and is an integral part of Hera Group’s commitment to the circular economy and protection of resources.

 

SCART® is an invitation to imagine new intelligent, creative and, above all, sustainable lifestyles.
The scope is to create a positive mentality towards recycling and reuse while encouraging responsible behaviour in environmental matters, and offering new incentives to create works of art and practical objects made exclusively from waste.

It was precisely in this way that the more than 1000 pieces of the Waste Art collection were produced with items such as sofas, armchairs, tables, chairs, lamps, chests of drawers, games, musical instruments that really work, clothes, installations, stage sets and costumes.

COLLABORATIONS

An important phase of development started in 2012 thanks to the collaboration with Il Teatro del Silenzio di Lajatico (PI), established by Andrea Bocelli:  plastic material, leather cuttings, old fabrics and curtains were processed entirely by hand by a team of young costume designers to create over 250 dresses used, in the different editions, by choir members, dancers and many other performers.

 

Thanks to the synergy of the project with the Academies of Fine Arts in Florence, Bologna, Carrara and Ravenna, students have the opportunity of participating in workshops on artistic experimentation using industrial waste as raw material for the creation of works of art and installations.

Equally interesting are the close collaborations with directors, set and costume designers. Thanks to these collaborations, SCART® has participated in a number of editions of TV programmes such as “X Factor” and “Amici (Friends)”, where the stage sets and costumes were made with 100% recycled materials, and also participated in 2018 in the productions for Marostica’s Opera On Ice and the Verdi Theatre of Pisa.

In 2019, SCART® produced the stage sets and costumes for the Laura Pausini e Biagio Antonacci Tour.

Over the years, SCART has participated in  numerous national and international exhibitions including travelling exhibitions in Ravenna, Imola, Modena, Pisa, Udine, Bologna (during “ArteFiera 2018“), Padua and Trieste.

At Milan Design City 2020, the project was present with the installation Business Wo/men“: 14 life-size statues made with waste collected in treatment plants operated by Herambiente.

A catalogue of the works on display is published for each SCART exhibition.

Of great importance are the hundreds of collaborations with individual artists who are not only able to publish their works free of charge on the project website, but can also sell them to the public. At the end of 2020, SCART has approximately 330 collaborations.

 

A REGULAR FIXTURE AT ECOMONDO

Every year, at Ecomondo, the most important Italian trade fair dedicated to the Green Economy held in Rimini, Emilia-Romagna, SCART presents a new artistic project in a new exhibition space made with 100% recycled waste materials.

At the 2018 edition, 16 figures of business men and women were exhibited, whose lifelike appearance was reproduced with many different types of waste materials selected and processed by students, such as leather filaments, shoe reinforcement supports, recycled cardboard, safety belts, frozen pea packs as well as pharmaceutical packaging materials, glass, Shearling waste, wood and polystyrene waste.

In 2017, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the project, Hera Group presented itself with The best of SCART: 20 works of art, one for each year of activity.

For Ecomondo 2016, artists created portraits of famous personalities whose faces came to life thanks to scraps of leather, zippers, fragments of glass, pebbles and many other recycled materials.

 

“A SEA TO BE SAVED” PROJECT

The sea and the urgent need to save it was the theme chosen by the Hera Group for the 2019 edition of Ecomondo.

Octopus, whales, sharks, turtles and fish of all species and the “whale Giovanni“, an artistic installation that reproduces a 12 metre life-size whale, lying on a pool in front of the stand, whose scope is to raise awareness on the importance of protecting our seas and the environmental impact of waste when this is not properly sorted.

The extraordinary kaleidoscope of colours of the numerous marine species present was obtained thanks to the use of many different, and often unusual, materials: small pieces of toys, electric cables, numerous electronic board reeds, tablet screens, car reflectors, scooters and mixed plastic scraps, to name but a few.

The Sperm Whale, on the other hand, was made with approximately 3,000 drinking cups recovered from one of Herambiente’s sorting plants.

The art works created for “A sea to be saved”  are the main characters of the financial presentations that the Hera Group is publishing in 2021.
The full SCART® collection is held at one of Herambiente’s facilities in Pisa. The project has two Workshops: one in Pisa, at the head office of the archive, and the other at Santa Croce sull’Arno.