yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How Do You Make a Skateboard Out of Trash? | Short Film Showcase


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

My name is Mac Primo. I'm an artist, director, stuff maker. I was contacted by the World Wildlife Fund; it's here for Earth Hour. They asked 15 artists from around the world to take stuff that already exists, repurpose it, give it a new life. That's pretty much what I do for everything.

So, I rephrased the challenge in my brain. I thought, "What do I give a about, and can that be made out of trash?" And like one second after, I was on the phone with Doc.

Mm-hmm. My name is Don Sanford. I am a home builder, carpenter, woodworker. My eldest daughter had a birthday. I want to buy her a skateboard. I went to this local skate shop, and the kid working there was like, "Check this out." I just locked in with them immediately; I just thought they were the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Would you remember when we bought your skateboard? Yes. What kind of board was it? Do you remember? Do you like riding it? Yes. There you go! And then I was like, “I got to figure out who these people are.”

They're four shapes; it's myself, my wife, my nephews, and all their friends that create handcrafted cruiser skateboards. So fast forward a year and a half, all Don Jose, dude. A year ago, I bought a board; I love it. I ride it every day. Do you want for me?

Gil makes a board out of trash. Don was like, “I have to think about that for a few days.” He drove to the next job site, up to the stack of six or eight buckets all piled one on another, and all of a sudden, I'm like, "Whoa, that’s it! Interesting."

Leave my mathematical mind going to work; a diameter of that bucket is about 12 inches. How's that by pi? We know we had two old paint buckets, cut off and flattened out, and put some old wood and put it through the bandsaw. Move it in and put it together, clamp it down, and pop it out, and actually work.

Buckets, there are thousands of them on every job site, throwaways, and this stuff goes in the earth, and it stays there forever. As a home builder, it always bothered me how much material went to waste. So the concept of taking stuff out of the landfill, giving it a second life, it's just fascinating.

Now, we're thinking, like, what if we can make this stuff and give them to people who need them? There's no material cost, and these things are free. All I have to do is fill them, and now there's something for someone who otherwise wouldn't have had it.

That thing is now a tool for empowerment, a tool for self-expression. Win-win-win all the way around! Like when I got a skateboard when I was a kid, I didn't just learn how to roll; I learned how to express myself.

For a while in my life, a curb was just a curb. Then suddenly, a curb was an opportunity, and that changed the way I saw the world. Once there was trash, now there's a skateboard. It warms my heart to think of that. If I can play some small role in making that transference, I can't think of anything better to do: make skateboards.

More Articles

View All
Explicit Laplacian formula
So let’s say you have yourself some kind of multivariable function, and this time let’s say it’s got some very high dimensional input. So X1, X2, on and on and on, up to, you know, X sub n for some large number n. Um, in the last couple videos, I told yo…
Learn to code in 60 seconds #programming #computerscience #python #khanacademy
Learn to code in 60 seconds. A program is a coded set of instructions for a computer to execute. Programs manipulate data, which come in several data types: integers, that’s whole numbers; floats, have decimal points; booleans, true or false; and strings,…
What Does God Look Like to You? | Brain Games
For many people, God is the strongest belief they have. But how does your brain conceive of the very idea of God? What happens when you actually try to draw the Divine? Dr. Andrew Newberg from Jefferson University Hospital has been trying to figure that o…
Spectrophotometry and the Beer–Lambert Law | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
What I want to do in this video is to talk a little bit about spectrophotometry, spectrophotometry, photometry, which sounds fairly sophisticated, but it’s really based on a fairly simple principle. So if I have, let’s say we have two solutions that cont…
Alaska Gives, Alaska Takes (Clips) | Alaska: The Next Generation
Woo, good shot, Sonta! Going down. That was distance right there. Thanks. Was that your last shot you hit it on? Second. Second, huh? Yeah. That was out there. That was a good reach. I felt like that was going to happen. I wasn’t quite sure and then. Oh,…
Shifts in demand for labor | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
We are now going to continue our study of labor markets, and in this video we’re going to focus on the demand curve for labor. So, let’s imagine that we’re talking about a market for people who work in the pant-making industry. So each of these firms righ…