Jennifer Meahan / The Current The Giving Tree exhibits photos taken by Julie Wise, and the tree is made up of cups, bottles, boxes and green paper.

For the student who lives for the “Go Green” lifestyle, the “The Giving Tree,” an interactive and collaborative installation, is currently being showcased at Gallery Visio, located on the lower level of the Millennium Center. The free exhibit runs from April 22 to June 24.

The ultimate idea of the exhibition is to express how much waste our society actually creates. This is displayed on an artificial tree made out of green recyclables and computer parts.

The top of the tree consists of green streamers, dangling bottles, Mountain Dew products, green plastic, cardboard beer cases, and green Mardi Gras beads. The tree stump was created out of black and white computer cords. Sitting under the tree are a variety of black records, the contents of a computer, and a petite tree. The star of the exhibit seems to be the walking toy dinosaur, who staggers around the room and greets the guests.

Gallery Visio and the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ environmental group, the Environmental Venture Organization, have been planning this collaboration since last year. The collection of green recyclables, such as Mountain Dew bottles, was pulled together by donations throughout the campus and the St. Louis City Museum, which is already known for its extensive use of recycled materials to create playgrounds for its visitors.

Web Innovations and Technology Services donated the wiring.

The organization, whose slogan is “Building Communities through Reuse, Recycling, and Education,” has rescued material from landfills, finding ways to reuse them in society and as a result has contributed to the preservation of natural resources.

As Missouri’s largest non-profit recycler, they have worked with UM-St. Louis in the past, including holding an electronics drive on campus last spring.

The walls of the exhibit are decorated in photos taken by Julianne Wise, senior, photography. They focus on the placement of broken electronics back in nature, where they once existed as the plastic from rubber trees. Most of the pictures involve a broken computer, television, and keyboard placed in fields on the side of the road.

The photography was a nice complement to the constricted room, but it would have been good to see more of a variety of broken electronics, such as cell phones, laptops, and radios.

While this was a wonderful project to follow Earth Day, with its use of cords, computer pieces, green streamers, and recyclables, it could have been extreme had there been more campus promotion other than word-of-mouth at Student Government Association meetings. Avoiding the worry of wasting a tree to spread word around campus turned out to be a promotion issue, so maybe a campus flier could have been sent through student e-mail. Next time, why not take it to another level and create a rainforest of recyclables, heavy on the walking baby dinosaurs?