If it wasn’t for the creative reuse of garbage, one of the most beloved characters in children’s literature would have been nothing more than a plateful of bacon. In the children’s book Charlotte’s Web when Wilbur’s life is in danger, his farmland companions employ every resource possible to save him from certain death. When things seemed at their darkest for Wilbur, his community got creative and took social action by presenting found text in a new way to assure his continued existence. Anthropomorphic upcycling made the simple country folk in E.B. White’s classic novel think differently and reimagine their value systems. The farmer Zuckerman didn’t know he was looking at garbage, he just knew that what he was seeing was convincing, and that is the power of upcycling.
Word Count: ~2160/250 = Read Time: 8.6 mins