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Janu

ary

2016

Your guide to an eco-friendly, sustainable lifestyle

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Waste not,Want not

Niko van Rensburg, artist and change maker, has spent much of his life turning the junk others throw away into useful items, arts and crafts. Here, he shares the story of his journey with us, his vision for the future and how he aims to inspire others to make a difference. Words: Niko van Rensburg. Pictures: © Jock Tame

My pet hate is wastage - discarding stuff unconsciously without a thought for what happens to that scrap piece of material, food

leftovers or chemical residues. In the same breath, my pet love is waste - not in itself, but as having potential for beauty when it is re-appropriated, recycled and thus reduced. I love making something beautiful out of waste, like an art or craft work, a toy, energy, or as a useful object that can be transformed into a teaching aid, tool or building material. The cool thing is that this process almost always saves time and money. And of course it saves the Earth too. Waste is all around us, so I never have a dull moment. What better passion and job could anyone ask for?”

Nikodemis van Rensburg, who prefers to be called Niko, is an eco warrior at heart. He is an artist, teacher and creative problem solving dynamo with a penchant for finding Earth-friendly fixes for do-it-yourself challenges, from domestic to commercial applications. He says, “Nature is my inspiration; beauty in its rawest form, life in its most natural state. My ultimate inspiration and drive is to co-create with Nature in making the world a beautiful place.”

His philosophy also extends to humanity. “People who are treated as waste, for example, by being excluded from the economy or marginalised, are also my focus,” he explains. “I am involved in certain rural areas in South Africa where people are eking out a living off the land, where there are no waste management systems in place and

there is a serious lack of the basic necessities.”

Niko became aware of the needs of marginalized South Africans when he was studying education at Wits University in the late eighties. As he puts it: “I was ‘fortunate’ to experience teaching in the rural areas of Apartheid South Africa. The poverty and lack of the most basic amenities made a huge impression on me. Of course, there was at the time an overwhelming political cause for the plight of these rural, disenfranchised people; many had been forceably removed to less fertile lands and so on. But there were many other factors at work, not the least of which was the already evident climate change and related issues gathering like a storm on the horizon.”

As he saw it, local solutions needed to be found to prevent more top-down, disempowering ideologies being forced on such communities. “Instead of importing more foreign teaching materials into the classrooms of these community schools (with hardly a chalk duster for the trashed chalk board, let alone electricity or consistent running water), as students we came up with creative teaching aids made from the junk which could be found everywhere. Junk has a negative stigma in these communities and kids would have to pick it up as punishment. So I started turning discarded junk into classroom aids, such as puppets and grammar trains. We called it ‘domesticating our teaching methodology’.”

The experience was life changing. It was not

long before Niko settled in one of those rural villages, living in a tent beneath a marula tree. Together with a colleague, he started building a traditional homestead using found materials. “We’d gather junk with school groups and use it for construction materials - old car doors were embedded in the walls so you could wind down the windows, colourful beer bottles collected at bar lounges were plastered into the walls to save on bricks, creating colourful, stained glass window effects inside. The bottles also helped to regulate the temperature inside the hut. These ideas were taken up by various people in the communities we worked in as they were practical, affordable - and novel in that context.”

He goes on to explain that waste plastic, car tyres and tin cans were also gathered by their school groups. “We took these items to various craft groups in the community so they could make mats, shoes and toys from these freely available items. These were marketed at various outlets all over the country. The community worked with us and we learned invaluable lessons and shared our sustainability ideas through demonstration rather than preaching about it. The environment benefited - and so did the people.” In fact, this win-win ethic was to stay with Niko for the rest of his life. But it wasn’t the first time he had been exposed to the idea of making useful things out of what others threw away.

His early childhood memories are of his mother frequenting a shop in Johannesburg’s Fordsburg suburb called Anti-Waste. “My

mom used the cut-offs, misprints and discards from material shops and factories to make our family’s clothes, as well as curtains, table cloths and so on for our home,” he says. His father, also an artist, was renowned for digging in dustbins at his art college as a student and re-using all the art materials the rich kids would throw away. He also taught Niko the names of the birds, trees and plants in their garden, imparting his own love and affinity with nature and the mountains of this beautiful country from Niko’s earliest days. Both parents were also teachers.

Today, Niko explains, “I grew up with a ‘waste not, want not’ ethic. We never had much, but we knew that we always had enough.” This is his philosophy to this day, whether making art, building a house, making a meal or teaching and learning in formal or informal classrooms. He says, “The garbage dump has always been my favourite art shop and hardware outlet. Simply walking down the street would without fail yield trash that could be used for a fix-it job on site or incorporated into an art work. As kids, we’d raid the trash and dump sites in our neighbourhood looking for old pram wheels to use for go-carts or bits of junk that could be made into toys and other stuff.”

Being a true blood South African, or ‘White African’ as he calls himself, Niko believes that the Boer maak ‘n plan attitude is embodied in the fabric of his being. He believes that every problem always has a solution; you just have to find it. “And more often than not,” he says, “that solution is to be found in junk.”

As for his obsession with nature and his related colour choices, Niko says, “Ever since I can remember, green has been my favourite colour and it is natural for me to go green as a vocation. In colour therapy and meditation, the colour green is the heart chakra - the middle zone. This is not esoterics but science; the frequency of green light is used to treat the body’s organs located at the heart centre. And I always follow my heart.

“Green is also the colour of the new revolution. At varsity in the late eighties and early nineties, while my co-students were working on the theories of grammar and appropriate methodologies for the New South Africa’s classrooms, I dug into banned literature on anarchy - the freedom movements. Libertarian pedagogy and Murray Bookchin’s social ecology blew my mind.” He explains that Bookchin coined the Green Flag revolution as a replacement for the Red Flag of the communist days and the Black Flag of the punk movements in Europe.

“Established systems and the prevailing hierarchies, seats of power and governing strategies on this planet were failures. Bookchin believed we should re-look at Nature as our teacher. Instead of saying that Nature consists of ecosystems that compete and fight to survive, we should think of nature as being made up of eco-communities that co-exist and work together for survival.” One of Niko’s great artistic influences is Suzi Gablick, a writer working with social art where the artist is no longer an aloof creator of ‘high art’, but is instead a social worker using art as a tool for social-economic and

environmental change that benefits the whole.

Niko believes that survival is a major issue for most of Earth’s creatures. Having a family (two adults and three kids, dogs, horses - and all the creatures in his indigenous, water wise garden with his vegetable patch, rainwater harvesting tank, solar geyser and gas run kitchen) means that Niko does many things to keep the pot boiling. Today, Niko does much of his work virtually through his affiliate website, promoting and offering products and services for the green and alternative energy industries. This allows him to work from home without having to waste energy and resources driving around. When he does need to get around, his bicycle is his first choice: “It saves me money, saves the planet, and keeps me fit and healthy too.”

Besides solar power, his latest endeavours are waste-to-energy applications - promoting and creating awareness of the different technologies available to individuals, households and businesses. Waste materials, both organic and synthetic, can be transformed into energy of all types, such as fertilisers and fuels. He says, “The science of pyrolysis is an ingenious way to turn waste like plastics into fuel such as LPG gas, petrol and diesel - without reverting to the highly controversial and environmentally unfriendly biogas that uses farms and natural lands to grow the fuel.”

Niko has a simple philosophy. “We live in exciting times. For as many of the negative things that us humans unleash in our world,

there are equally as many, if not more, positive things we are coming up with every day to save ourselves and our world. Embrace it and keep looking on the bright side. A positive attitude is really the only weapon; any other is destructive.

“These days it is more acceptable to be ‘green’; in my student days we were not taken seriously and were branded as ‘hippies’. Now, even mega millionaires are involved in the green industry. Governments

are on board, even if it is not always for the right reasons. Money, however, still rules the world and it remains a challenge for my belief - that the best things in life come free - as a way of dealing with the prevailing capitalist ethics on this planet.

“Bottom line for me is to live my life with integrity, to practice what I preach, and to demonstrate what I passionately believe in through example, patience and humility. And to change the world, starting with myself, my

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family and my home. This lifestyle of ‘show and tell’ has a very deep, albeit not always immediately visible, domino effect on the world at large,” says Niko.

This dreaming, living and passion will soon be taking Niko and his family out of Johannesburg’s urban jungle. They plan to relocate to a small holding in the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal to live and work as sustainable living examples and consultants, surrounded by natural beauty.