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Some people look at a dumpster and see a place to dump trash.
Others look at dumpsters and see real potential, like the public works department in Tempe, Arizona, who turned old dumpsters into public recreational areas.
KTar News reported that the public works department took old dumpsters and filled them with dirt and planted cacti, flowers, and full-sized trees. Next, they created a seating area along the outside of the dumpster. One of the patios even has a built-in solar-powered phone charging station!
The result? A mobile recreational area that includes a garden and a bench. Since the dumpsters would have been disposed of otherwise, this project was completely free to taxpayers.
“We want to reuse, we want to repurpose, we want to recycle whenever we possibly can, and this is a really creative way of using something that wasn’t going to be used,” said Kris Baxter-Ging, spokesperson for the city of Tempe.
So far, there are three mini dumpster parks in Tempe. They plan to roll them around to different locations throughout the year.
Tempe is one of few cities adopting the practice of dumpster parks, but we could see dumpster patios as a hot new trend, nationwide!