Meet Scott. He has an old shed in his yard that he wants to tear down, but he doesn’t want to take anything to the dump. "It’s a hazard," Scott says of his Portland garage. "We want to take it down, but we don’t want it all to go to a landfill." Scott and his wife decided to demo the shed themselves and found resources through a Metro website to recycle nearly the entire dilapidated shed.
Scott’s story is just one of the many that is part of OMSI’s new sustainability project to teach families how small, sustainable actions make a big impact when adopted by the hundreds of people.
OMSI’s new, permanent bilingual exhibit called, “Clever Together: Our Everyday Choices” or “Juntos somos ingeniosos: Una decision a la vez,” helps families learn how simple choices help protect the environment, improve family finances and bring neighbors closer together.
“Clever Together,” opening in the museum’s Earth Hall on Oct. 7, encourages guests to weigh the environmental, economic and social impacts of their choices. The bilingual exhibit engages visitors with interactive displays centered on food choices, transportation, product consumption and energy use.
Visitors are invited to use human power to take a virtual walk or bike ride through familiar places in the region, employ smart sorting tactics to divert waste from landfills and find ways to save energy in a funky room furnished with everyday home appliances and personal electronics.
The exhibit reaches beyond OMSI’s walls with a unique, bilingual campaign that incorporates posters, signs and sustainable art pieces at 100 Portland locations around neighborhoods, at public transit stops, public works and community projects. Metro’s Learning Gardening at Blue Lake Park and the Natural Gardening exhibit at the zoo both feature signs that encourage visitors to call to hear a personal story in English or Spanish about gardening.
Signs are now popping up around the region and feature a variety of stories about people making sustainable choices, such as planting a garden, commuting by bike or using greener cleaners in their homes and businesses.