About the talk:

The Recycling Band played at TEDxKrakow, which took place on 25 October 2013 at Stara Zajezdnia in Kraków's Jewish district. Our theme this year was Make! and was a celebration of making. We asked our speakers to explore and demonstrate the practice, and to ponder what it takes to make more makers. We featured some of Krakow's makers and created a dedicated maker space to encourage our audience of over 600 people to have a go at making something -- anything!

Recorded during: TEDxKraków 2013

About the speaker:

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. That is especially true in the instance of the Recycling Band. Drawing attention to a global environmental issue of waste and the importance of recycling, this Polish musical band travels around Europe playing on instruments made out of trash.

The band consists of Kamil Kędzierski (water bottle guitar, instrument creator), Marcin Nenko (water bottle bass guitar), Dominik Stankiewicz (“waste” drums), and Piotr Bolanowski (selfmade keyboard). Kamil Kędzierski, then a metallurgy student at Krakow’s University of Science and Technology (AGH), has been creating these recycled instruments since 2011 and so far has created bass and acoustic guitars, ukuleles, drums, trumpets, violins and a keyboard out of materials such as old wooden door, tables, water bottles, mattresses, combs, and paint cans and buckets. It takes a lot of imagination to build such things, don’t you think?

Recycling Band was also a finalist in the fifth edition of the Polish version of Got Talent. As October’s TEDxKraków theme is Make!, this band will demonstrate how you can make music out of trash.