Our Educational Project

As our project continues to grow, the Inventing Remida Portland Project has the opportunity to reduce emissions from incinerators and moderate waste in local landfills, similar to the work in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Here is a description of the Remida Center in Reggio Emilia, Italy from their website: http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/remida.htm.

Remida promotes the idea that waste materials can be resources. The center collects, exhibits, and offers alternative and reclaimed materials, obtained from unsold stock and rejects or discard materials from industrial and handicraft production, with the aim to reinvent their use and meaning. Remida is a cultural project that represents a new, optimistic, and proactive way of approaching environmentalism and building change through giving value to reject materials, imperfect products, and otherwise worthless objects, to foster new opportunities for communication and creativity in a perspective of respect for objects, the environment, and human beings.

These officially named Remida Centers now approach 18 worldwide. The centers are an avenue for manufacturers to reuse and repurpose materials discarded from the end-product manufacturing process, which in turn keeps thousands of pounds of material out of the landfills. These unique materials are then stored, sorted, and made available through a teaching and learning center--Remida--so that teachers, children, families and community members can see what possibilities re-purposing material create. Questions which have led us to propose this Remida Portland project endeavor include: What can be re-made from the donated recycled materials? How can Remida educate the public on repurposing valuable objects? And, how can we provide those materials in a single location with an education focus? Through these questions the Inventing Remida Portland Project aspires to change the consumption culture at a young age, fostering intelligent moderation as a new norm.