Orchestra of Recycled Instruments

In a previous post, Your Trash is Our Luxury, we saw how people are making a living sorting through trash to more efficiently recycle material. In this story, we again see ingenuity at work.

From the press release of the Inter-American Development Bank:

The Orchestra of Recycled Instruments is a mind-boggling creative effort. An innovative 18 member group of young musicians from Paraguay, the orchestra uses musical instruments made with recycled materials, resulting in a seamless combination of culture and social innovation.

Favio Chávez, the Orchestra’s visionary Director, used his ingenuity to put a team together to search the landfill for usable materials and craft musical instruments out of discarded materials. In Cateura, a village that grew around a landfill, children are often at risk of getting involved with drugs and gangs, but the Orchestra of Recycled Instruments has offered these young people new life opportunities through music.

In just a few years, their program has led to a thriving music school and a youth orchestra that performs internationally. The Orchestra is also the subject of a documentary, Landfill Harmonic, which is slated to be released in 2014.

There’s an interesting video at http://youtu.be/fXynrsrTKbI called “The World Sends Us Garbage; We Send Back music.”