CASH IN THE TRASH

By TAD BARTIMUS

Just when I was starting to feel noble and self-righteous about composting coffee grounds and ironing wrinkled Christmas wrap, along comes Washington millionaire Walt Anderson to one-upsmanship the world in recycling.

Anderson says he and his Russian partners want to convert the space station Mir into a cosmic hotel for tourists seeking the ultimate adventure destination. Despite its problems – remember worrying about the astronauts' frequent life-support glitches? – Anderson says the now-abandoned space station represents "a huge opportunity" and he's willing to pay $21 million to Energiya, its Russian owners, to sign a lease.

The venture capitalist concedes the orbiting outpost -- launched Feb. 20, 1986 -- is old, but insists "you don't tear own an old building because it has a few heating and air-conditioning problems."

Certainly not when Anderson expects to collect $40 million from Mir's first paying guest. Granted, plenty of plumbers, electricians and bureaucrats stand between the entrepreneur and his way-out-of-towners, so check-in promises to be a while off. But such opportunism highlights our raised consciousness about re-using almost everything under the sun.

For years artists have consulted the junk yard to give new life to our castoffs. Youngsters learn early they can make their own paper from old scraps of spelling tests and journal pages. In the kitchen, we save empty glass spaghetti jars and last night's aluminum foil to hold and reheat leftovers. At the office, we double-side memos and slipcover the furniture with old drapes.

I never thought I'd wear a snippet from a car radiator, a bit of rain gutter or a piece off the back of an electric stove, but that was before I saw jewelry made out of rubbish. What started out as McKenna Hallett's quick solution to a temporary cash flow problem in 1992 has yielded her a lucrative, steady income flowing from her garage workshop.

"I love finding construction site debris, copper sheets off the side of a house, abandoned appliances at the dump, aluminum tubing from old stoves," says Ms. Hallett. "I've even used the generator winding out of an airplane. It looks like fettuccine and it's flexible like a noodle."

The first weekend she took her reclaimed jewelry to a crafts fair she made $1,000 and was hooked. Last Christmas her pieces were a hit at a Neiman-Marcus branch; 10 other specialty stores carry her Currents line.

"I grow and harvest my own bamboo, pick up beach glass, collect bits of shells. My cording is 2,000-pound-test fishing line. My whole premise is that we must reduce, re-use, recycle and re-think our relationship to everything we use," she says.

Ms. Hallett spurns electricity, heat and chemicals to create her jewelry, which costs between $15 and $100 per piece and is accompanied by a card asking buyers to "remember our resources are finite."

That's the underlying impetus of the decades-old movement which began with pop cans and newspapers and now results in daily acts of resource conservation by millions. Recycling has become pervasive; children routinely use milk cartons as paint cans, corporations buy scrap metal to manufacture new parts, inventors convert plastic soda bottles into door mats and outdoor decking. Early indoctrination and organized repetition is convincing us we need to "pitch in" to save the planet.

If Anderson and the Russians pull off the Mir remodel they'll take recycling where no man has gone before. I hope when we get there we'll find those dropped $1,000 hammers and $100 screws experts say are floating around above our heads; I'd love to wear a necklace that's out of this world.

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