I Harvest Tech’s Forsaken Property

Once a month during the school year, about 70 members of the MIT community drop off as many as 800 usable items that they no longer need in the Stata Center lobby—and roughly 160 people pick those things up. So when artist Kyle Haines, 20, heard about the program—known as Choose to Reuse—from MIT student Shannen Kizilski ’15, he decided to make sculptures out of items he found there. During Earth Week, the MIT Green Committee, Staff for Sustainability, showcased the results, including a chair fashioned from rolled-up copies of the Tech, a tiny white whale riding a paper car on a Möbius strip made of sheet metal from a helium tank (called “Moby’s Trip”), and a bionic beaver.  

Items incorporated into the bionic beaver include a dual monitor wall mount, an alarm clock, a solar-powered lantern, and “a lot of paper.” The beaver’s teeth are made of broken glass from a Building 2 office door; its tail includes a MacBook circuit board.