We connect people with plants and each other
In Garden to Connect, we make the urban landscape greener and bring people closer to each nature and each other. Urban gardens are often expensive and resource intensive when using plant containers of steel, concrete or terracotta. Reusing plastic building waste saves money and resources. By upcycling discarded products, production of new plant containers are avoided, which helps to mitigate climate change.
Vinyl Veggies: Revolutionising food growing with vertical farming
Garden to Connect presented Vinyl Veggies, a groundbreaking sculpture at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 in Copenhagen. This captivating installation, inspired by the iconic Centre Pompidou in Paris, showcased the transformative potential of vertical farming and emphasized the crucial role of PVC as a material in revolutionising food production.
Constructed predominantly of repurposed PVC, Vinyl Veggies exemplified the possibilities of vertical farming while promoting the importance of sustainability through material reuse. This innovative sculpture demonstrated how PVC, with its durability and flexibility, can be a key component in creating efficient and space-saving vertical farming systems.
The sculpture is made for disassembly and will host other plants in the future. At the end of its service life, it can be mechanically recycled, providing valuable raw material for new PVC pipes.
Garden to Connect selected by the European Commission
The Festival of the New European Bauhaus is the new flagship event of the European Commission, aiming to bring together talents and ideas from all over Europe, which contribute to the accomplishment of the European Green Deal.
The Garden to Connect project was selected to become part of the mobile exhibition, situated in four central squares of Brussels. Thanks to everyone who showed up!
"If the European Green Deal has a soul, then it is the New European Bauhaus which has led to an explosion of creativity across our Union."
Garden to Connect at The People’s Festival of Nature
The People’s Festival of Nature in Denmark is an annual celebration held since 2016 of everything nature has to offer and with 20,000 attendees. The festival centers around a public debate, where politicians, scientists, organizations, and the public unite to discuss and debate on a variety of issues and topics involving nature. At the 2022 edition of the festival, the Garden to Connect project taught festivalgoers how to build your own garden with scraps of plastic waste.
Pop-up gardens invite to creativity
Aarhus Festival is one of the largest cultural events in Northern Europe. Pop-up urban gardens made from upcycled PVC pipes were displayed at the 2021 Festival. The garden invited to creative decorations by festival goers and brought a green element to the cityscape.
Medicinal plants grow in reused PVC
The beneficial effects of medicinal plants have been known for millennia. Now, users of the rehabilitation facility MarselisborgCenter in Aarhus, Denmark, and its many visitors, get the opportunity to see, touch, smell and taste some of the herbs. The scene is a small oasis in an area of the center’s newly renovated park called The Immersion.
Healing herbs help with rehabilitation
The plants in the herb garden speak to all the senses: the sense of touch, the sense of smell, the sense of taste, the sense of hearing and the sense of sight. By touching and smelling a furry sage leaf, the memory can be activated, which can improve rehabilitation.
The garden is built with PVC pipe waste, which would otherwise have been sent to recycling. By reusing the pipes as plant containers, the life span of the material is extended. Sage, mint and a wide range of other medicinal herbs grow in the pipes. The climate-friendly approach to the garden fits in the overall climate vision for the renovation of the park, which in addition to being a recreational space is designed to handle increasing rainfall due to climate change.
Urban farming on the rise
In cities all over the world, city dwellers are getting into urban farming and grow crops locally on the terms of the city. The increasing share of the global population settling in urban areas is only reinforcing this trend. Urban agriculture is a natural consequence of urbanisation, which means that more and more of us live in cities. From high-tech vertical indoor growing systems in Singapore over rooftop gardens in Paris to traditional farming in Cuba, local food production will without a doubt become more and more important in the future.
