Dump that dirty old trash can into an even larger one, because it’s time to upgrade! Artists are not content to sit on their hands while the world turns into garbage. Their response? Turn the garbage cans into art.

(Images via thenewecologist, happytiler, egotvonline, foodbeast)

Garbage can modification covers a huge range; from dumpster vehicles to art gallery domes with ecological motives. The real lesson is that nothing in this world has to be boring, not even one of the most mundane objects in our everyday lives.

(Images via crookedbrains, kickapoofart, squash, seattlepi)

Give an artist the right supplies and they’ll turn the most boring trash receptacle into a creative experience. It’s easy to tell which garbage cans would win my trash.

(Images via marshalladams)

Smashcans are the wave of the future! They are normal disposal units that have been transformed into a dysfunctional new member of the family by the Baltimore, Maryland based artist Marshall Adams.

(Images via tumblrbot, 4nitsirk, offbeathome)

Home bins can be turned into something festive. Become the most popular home on your block for the garbage collectors by adding a touch of style.

(Images via nerdnirvana, urbanprankster, oddee, neatorama, randommization)

Trash cans are people too! Well, some of them are, at least. Be sure to feed them. The simple addition of giant eyes to a garbage can is enough to turn them into a fun bit of street art.

(Images via jalopyjournal, americantrails, presurfer, bcx)

A little paint and creativity can go a long way into turning the streets into a more vibrant and exciting place! Go out and make some change.

(Images via walyou, walyou, geyserofawesome, sharegoodstuffs, crookedbrains)

A little style in design could go a long way in making more interesting garbage cans. Be sure to support the movement by refusing to purchase a plastic molded can!

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Luxurious and eco-friendly, Blue Forest‘s imaginative and playful tree houses, lodges and educational facilities seem to be designed to bring out every adult’s wide-eyed inner child. Blue Forest has designed many incredible structures that celebrate the warmth, coziness and sustainability of wood, honoring the material itself and of course, its source. Check out these 18 eye-catching, envy-inducing buildings made by the UK-based company.

Amberley Castle

Blue Forest’s best-known treehouse is located on the grounds of the Amberley Castle Country Hotel in Scotland. It’s used as a recreational getaway space for hotel guests, and also as a multi-purpose venue for corporate entertainment, meals, weddings and private parties.

RotatED School Concept

This intriguing concept design is a prefabricated, hand-crafted eco classroom that can be set onto a foundation on any of its six sides for a multitude of purposes including gallery space, nature observation and educational lectures.

Tongole Wilderness Lodge

Located on the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve in Malawi, the Tongole Wilderness Lodge overlooks a river in one of the country’s last ‘truly unspoiled’ wildlife areas. Offered as an eco-friendly place to stay in the region, the open-air lodge was built from local materials including clay, rock, wood and thatch.

Eco Perch

From its diminutive-looking exterior, you would never guess that this Eco Perch vacation rental can sleep four people. Inside are a full-sized bed, bunks for children, a kitchen with a dining area and a full bathroom with shower. Based on Blue Forest’s treehouses, the unit is elevated from the ground. It can be delivered, assembled and ready for decoration with five days.

Cleveley Mere Tree House Hotel

This may just be one of the most luxurious treehouse vacation rentals in the UK. The contemporary lakeside treehouse for getaway spot Cleveley Mere can sleep up to six, with two bedrooms, a sun deck, floor-to-ceiling windows and a rope bridge.

Treehouse Study Center

One of Blue Forest’s educational facilities, the Treehouse Study Center teaches children about nature and the woods in the center of New Forest National Park in Hampshire. It includes two treehouse classrooms, ground-based buildings containing other facilities, canopy walkways, a rope bridge, solar-powered lighting, a water catchment system and biomass energy.

Tarifa Eco Lodge

The organic shape and natural materials of the Tarifa Eco Lodge make it ideal for a nature-oriented getaway. Located in the hills of Andalucia on the Spanish Costa de la Luz, the Tarifa Ecolodge overlooks the Straits of Gibraltar, with views of Africa. It gets its power and hot water from solar panels and has its own water catchment and purification system.

Treetop Holiday

The round Treetop Holiday tree house of Sussex, near the spa town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, is an eco-lodge in the countryside with views of farmland. To access it, you must cross a nearly 80-foot-long rope bridge over a scenic pond.

Longridge Training Center

Charming in its organic simplicity, the Longridge Training Center offers water sports and land-based activities for young people. Blue Forest gave this building, which includes kitchens, meeting rooms, a training hall and more, a full range of eco-friendly features like rainwater harvesting, a heat loss recovery system and lots of sustainably sourced wood.

Feltonfleet Treehouse School

Off-kilter windows give this cute treehouse school in Cobham lots of cheer and personality, adding to the uniqueness of the space. The Feltonfleet Preparatory School added the treehouse as a sustainable way for the school to extend its teaching space.

Center Parcs Treehouses

A stunning juxtaposition of rustic and contemporary style, these treehouses for the Center Parcs Sherwood Forest each have four double bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, open living spaces, kitchens and secondary treehouse ‘entertainment pods’ with home theaters and pool tables. As with all of Blue Forest’s projects, the treehouses are eco-friendly, with lake-source heat pumps, low-energy lighting and grey water recycling.

Enchanted Forest

Built along a small river in the Hertordshire countryside, Enchanted Forest is a two-story fantasy play structure for kids. It features a large main room and open turret with a ladder leading up through a ‘secret’ trap door to a hideaway upstairs, and even has a wood-burning stove.

Adventure Playground

This sprawling treehouse has a main ‘tower’ and several different decks that form a sprawling fantasy play area for kids, incorporating a central trampoline, swings and slides.

Woodland Haven

Quirky and fun, Woodland Haven was built around a central tree as an outdoor play area for children and includes a secret trap door, cargo net, fireman’s pole, monkey bars, swings, a slide and even a basket and pulley to lift items up to the treehouse. A swing bridge attaches it to a deck across the yard.

Fairfield Eco Classroom

Looking like nothing more than a stack of logs, this structure is actually a small and efficient pre-fabricated classroom. The Fairfield Eco-Classroom is raised nearly 7 feet from the ground and covered in a log facade, which was even applied to the window shutters to complete the illusion when they’re closed.

Treetops

Built about 14 feet off the ground at the edge of a forest in Cumbria, Northwest England, the fittingly named ‘Treetops’ is a rustic treehouse with a secondary drinks deck for adults, connected with a swinging rope bridge.

Benenden School

Ringed in copper, this round school building is made of sustainably harvested timber and constructed to blend into its woodland environment. The Benenden School eco classroom is the first building in the UK to process harvested rainwater from its sedum roof into hot and cold drinking water using only solar power.

Rainforest Encounter – Eden Project

Blue Forest has designed a nearly 500-foot canopy walkway for rainforest education resource The Eden Project in Cornwall. ‘Rainforest Encounter’ will be built within the Rainforest Biome at the center, taking visitors on a journey through the treetops nearly 40 feet above the ground.

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Hiding in plain sight to provide energy and light! That’s not Toronto Hydro’s motto but it could be – for the better part of a century, the Canadian utility’s policy was to design hundreds of electrical substations so that they would “blend in” with their surrounding neighborhoods. Though many have been decommissioned, many more remain.

Edwardian Electrical Edifices

(image via: John FitzGerald)

Toronto Hydro was established in 1911, the year in which electrical power from the massive new generators at Niagara Falls first lit up Toronto’s downtown streets. It became quickly apparent that (a) a network of substations was required to complete the emerging power grid and (b) Toronto’s citizens were not amenable to having ugly conglomerations of metal, wire and ceramic resistors plunked smack dab in the middle of their neighborhoods.

(images via: BlogTO and John FitzGerald)

Toronto Hydro set up an in-house team of unnamed architects whose purpose was to “clothe” the substations in the fashionable brick, masonry and woodwork of the day. The earliest stations, of which Duncan Station at 29 Nelson Street is the oldest (1910) still standing, were generally larger than homes and aped the size, shape and style of Toronto’s fancier office buildings and industrial warehouses.

(images via: BruceK and JohnnyGEO)

As these structures weren’t actually homes and businesses, sharp-eyed passersby noted a few differences that immediately set the substations apart… like bronzed, weathervane-equipped exhaust vents on the roof of the 2357 Danforth station (circa-1926) and ubiquitous “Keep Out!” warning signs displayed on all of them.

Glengrove Substation: “The Castle”

(images via: PhotoSensitive and BlogTO)

Up until the advent of the Great Depression, most of Toronto Hydro’s substations tended towards the grandiose both in size and style. The Glengrove substation at 2833 Yonge Street (south of Lawrence) opened in 1930 and was the penultimate expression of this philosophy.

(image via: Toronto Star)

Known colloquially as “The Castle”, the ivy-covered sprawling stone complex would look right at home on an English baronial estate. Oak doors, leaded glass windows and rough-cut stone walls all contribute to a real atmosphere of grandeur made even more majestic when night falls and interior lighting switches on automatically.

Stealthy Salt Boxes

(images via: BlogTO and Alice in Search of a City)

Things changed before and after the Second World War when a more subdued design ethos took Toronto Hydro back to its original mission re the substations: blend them in and avoid obtrusiveness. The new “plain jane” look was driven by economic concerns pre-war; then post-war when Toronto’s emerging suburbs began sprouting smaller, simpler “Salt Box” homes designed for the requirements and incomes of returning soldiers. Plain maybe, but note the white picket fence at 640 Millwood in midtown Toronto.

(images via: Toronto Star and TheStar.com)

Ironically, some of these substations have outlived their original neighborhoods and today find themselves standing out like sore thumbs after the surrounding homes have been sold off and knocked down. The sad remnant above stood on the southeast corner of Pharmacy and St. Clair Avenues in east central Toronto for decades until it was finally demolished in late 2010.

(images via: BlogTO and Google Maps)

We can attribute some of the credit for Toronto Hydro’s suburban aesthetic to one Harold Bodwell, a utility employee charged with the task of designing substations for Toronto’s new neighborhoods. Bothwell not only specified the style of the neighborhood substations but also dictated the grounds be landscaped and regularly maintained.

Oil’s Well That Ends…

(image via: Jon Lasiuk)

Things don’t always go as smoothly as Toronto Hydro would like and when rare accidents like the transformer vault fire above occur, the substations’ covers are blown sky high. Watch a video of the “event” here.

(images via: Jon Lasiuk and CityNews Toronto)

“Transformers are actually filled with mineral oil, no longer PCB’s,” explained TFD Division Commander Andrew Kostiuk, “and if it gets hot enough to catch fire it’s quite a spectacular fire.” So much for being good neighbors.

Hiding On Plain Sites

(images via: BLDG Blog)

Toronto artist Robin Collyer was the first to document the phenomenon of Toronto’s urban and suburban camouflaged substations, photographing a number of them in the 1980s. Collyer’s use of soft focus and black & white film creates an aura of timeless mystery around these stealthy structures.

(images via: BlogTO and International Metropolis)

Nearly 300 of these substations were built on residential streets in central and suburban parts of the Greater Toronto Area over a period of nearly a century, and about 85% of them are still in use. Roughly 45 of the substations have been decommissioned for one reason or another and a few have taken on new lives as retail shops – one north Toronto substation is now used by a religious denomination for their meetings others (the example above hails from the city of Windsor) have become small quaint stores.

Modern Electrical Living

(images via: BLDG Blog and CCCA)

One might say Toronto Hydro’s neighborhood substations are a collective working museum of the past century’s architectural styles and trends. It’s a concept easier said than done: the camo cladding has always come second to the main mission of providing uninterrupted electrical service to Toronto’s varied neighborhoods – a very close second, by appearances.

(images via: BlogTO and International Metropolis)

Years and decades pass but Toronto Hydro’s substation designers move with the times, not against them. The past half-century has seen faux-Georgian mansions with gabled windows and triangular plinths above the “door”, 1950s & 1960s ranch style spreads (another example from Windsor shown above) with asymmetrical rooflines, post-and-beam construction and decorative brick screening, and finally post-modernist 1980s styling that eschews brick altogether in favor of organic concrete and glass block accents.

(images via: Toronto Star and Paul Henman)

Other Canadian and American cities (New York City comes to mind) have employed urban camouflage techniques to put neighborhoods over infrastructure but Toronto’s record in both quality, quantity and history is particularly outstanding. Though individually these urban & suburban electrical substations are easily missed, together they represent a surprisingly studied effort by a large, faceless corporation to take into account the sensibilities of their residential customers. Shocking, eh?

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From massive illuminated Chinese restaurants to cute little BBQ tables for ten, these 14 floating restaurants make smart use of available space and turn the dining experience into something of an adventure on the sea.

Jumbo Floating Restaurant, Hong Kong

(images via: wikimedia commons)

One of Hong Kong’s biggest attractions, the Jumbo Kingdom Floating Restaurant sites within the city’s Aberdeen Harbour and has hosted the likes of Queen Elizabeth II and John Wayne. Though it began as a relatively humble floating restaurant in the ’70s, a 2003 renovation basically turned it into a theme park with sightseeing, shopping and cultural attractions.

BBQ Donut’s Floating Restaurant Tables, Germany

(images via: bbq-donut.de)

Germany’s BBQ Donut restaurant is definitely one-of-a-kind. First of all, its floating tables, which have seating for ten, make smart use of water space and are quite a novelty draw. At the center of each of these tables is a BBQ that turns into a picnic table. Each floating pod has its own built-in sound system and even silent electric propulsion so it can cruise around.

The Salt & Sill Restaurant & Hotel, Sweden

(images via: salt to sill)

The Salt & Sill is a minimalist 23-room barge that also serves as a top-notch seafood restaurant specializing in herring and fresh local produce. All 23 rooms have their own outdoor seating areas, but the hotel’s sole suite has an extra-enticing benefit: a private roof-top jacuzzi. The hotel’s location on the lake, by the way, is not a gimmick: the adjacent land simply didn’t have any room.

Sea Palace, Amsterdam

(images via: jylcat, hotel belga)

The ornate Sea Palace is Europe’s first floating Chinese restaurant, and is located near Central Station in Amsterdam. Its pagoda-style exterior is definitely not a sight you would expect to see in Amsterdam, but floating Chinese restaurants like Sea Palace are actually not uncommon in Europe.

Nusa Penida Island Floating Restaurant, Indonesia

(images via: nusaisland.wordpress.com)

Just off the small island of Nusa Penida, which is itself located near Indonesia’s Bali Island, is this cool-looking floating restaurant. The massive pontoon restaurant can be found just off Toya Pakeh beach.

Restaurants of Cat Ba Bay, Vietnam

(images via: phil_marion)

Vietnam’s Cat Ba Bay is home to several floating restaurants, which make for an interesting sight as they bob in the water alongside floating homes and fishing boats. Most of them are, of course, seafood restaurants.

Veli Lake Floating Restaurant, Trivandrum

(images via: skyscraper city)

This pretty floating restaurant can be found in Veli Lake in Trivandrum, India. The restaurant is connected to the mainland by a floating bridge.

Rustar Dhow Floating Restaurant, Dubai

(images via: rustardowboat.com)

Rustar Dhow is the world’s largest floating restaurant that actually cruises around instead of just staying in one place. It’s located in – of course – Dubai, where everything is bigger and more ornate than it is everywhere else in the world. The Rustar Dhow can carry up to 400 passengers at a time.

William Thornton Floating Bar & Restaurant, Norman Island

(images via: gogobot)

Anchored out in the water off Norman Island in the British Virgin Islands, ‘The Willy T’ is only accessible by boat. This floating bar and restaurant is known locally as one of the wildest ‘party barges’ in the area. It’s been in operation since 1985 and offers both lunch and dinner.

Petit Verdot at the Riviera on Vaal, South Africa

(images via: safari now)

The Petit Vardo floating restaurant is located adjacent to the Riviera on Vaal Hotel, which is in the Vaal River about 45 minutes from Johannesburg in South Africa. The barge is topped with an exposed dining deck, and the whole thing is illuminated at night like a giant floating lantern.

India’s Kettuvallam

(images via: noo)

In the Indian state of Kerala, beautiful houseboats with thatched roofs are a common sight floating on the water. Many of these luxury houseboats are open to tourists, who can come onboard and relax while enjoying a freshly cooked meal from the boat’s kitchen.

Tattershall Castle, London

(images via: wikimedia commons)

Moored in the River Thames in London, the PS Tatterhsall Castle is a former passenger and goods ferry built in 1934. During World War II, it was the first civil vessel to carry radar, but by 1973 the ship had run its course and was retired from service. Since 1981, it has been a popular bar and restaurant.

The Plastic Dining Room, Vancouver

(images via: inhabitat)

This lovely little floating dining room made by the School of Fish Foundation is held aloft by 1,672 plastic bottles. Made of reclaimed pinewood, the dining room serves an elegant six-course sustainable seafood menu catered by C Restaurant.

Cincinnati’s Waterfront, the Restaurant That Floated Away

(images via: eater)

Have you been wondering this whole time whether the docked floating restaurants ever escape from their moorings? It has, in fact, happened. Waterfront, a floating restaurant near Cincinnati, broke free in March of 2011 with 83 diners on board. The diners had to be rescued using “a makeshift gangplank of ladders and ropes” while the restaurant was saved from floating too far downriver by tugboats. Unfortunately, the accident caused a lot of damage and the restaurant has not been re-opened.

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It doesn’t matter where you go in the world: it seems like litter is always an unwelcome part of the scenery. The Swiss city of Lucerne decided to do something about their litter problem by enticing residents and visitors to have fun while throwing their rubbish away. The initiative is called “Lucerne Shines,” and in the many years since it was implemented the city has seen an exceptional response.

(all images via: Freshome)

The project saw 16 public trash bins converted to public game stations. You won’t find any fancy touch-screen games, though – these games are all about cleaning up your mess and leaving the city a little prettier than you found it. From short mazes to free-throw lines to hopscotch, the initiative appeals to everyone who likes to have a little unexpected fun in the middle of an otherwise-ordinary day.

The project is a follow-up to a more general city cleanup initiative. The original effort saw a huge reduction in the amount of waste on city streets, but Lucerne was still spending an astonishing amount of money on litter cleanup every year. The city then had the brilliant idea to use fun as an incentive…and suddenly, the citizens of Lucerne just couldn’t wait to pop their trash into the waiting receptacles.

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