IN a waterfront industrial area near the Bridgeport line in Stratford, Connecticut, the trucks keep dumping trash and the school buses keep dumping children.
Eight-year-old Matt Carlucci is in awe as soon as he walks through the front door of The Garbage Museum, confronted immediately by a colourful, 3.7m-tall dinosaur made out of junk. "Trash-o-saurus" resembles something out of the animated movie Robots.
Pennsylvania sculptor Leo Sewell, who grew up near a dump, fashioned the 7.3m-long piece out of old "no parking" signs, cell phones, shoes, licence plates, sunglasses, plastic toys and anything else he could get his hands on. Visitors are given a list of things to find on the dinosaur, and it's no easy feat.
"It's pretty cool," Matt said during a trip with his third-grade class from Sherman, Connecticut. "All the garbage on it, how big it is and how much it weighs."
The sculpture is 907kg, representing the average amount of garbage and recyclables each person in Connecticut discards each year. Like all the exhibits, Trash-o-saurus was designed with the goal of teaching how important recycling is.
The museum opened in 1993 at the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority's (CRRA) recycling centre in Stratford, "before 'green' was cool," a fact sheet says. About 32,200 people visited the museum and took part in its off-site programmes last year, a record.
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