Professor Jeff Wilson outside his dumpster, on campus at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. Source: Instagram
COULD you spend a year in a dumpster, all in the name of science?
That's what Jeff Wilson, environmental science professor at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, is doing.
Professor Wilson is transforming a tiny 33-square-foot rubbish bin, which is about 1 per cent of the size of the average American home, into one of the world's most sustainable tiny houses.
With the help of his students and environmental experts, Prof Wilson wants to prove that humans can happily live with less and minimise our environmental impact.
"How do we equip current and future generations with the tools they need for sustainable living practices?" Prof Wilson asks in a mini-documentary about The Dumpster Project.
"This [project] is to test, to the absolute limit, whether you can be happy and healthy in a very small space," he said.
Almost three years ago, when the lease to his apartment ran out, Prof Wilson posted on Facebook:
"Starting at 6pm, I will be selling all of my home furnishings, clothes, kitchen appliances, and everything else in the apartment for $1 an item."
He then secretly spent the next seven months sleeping on the floor of his work office, all the while getting the dumpster ready to live in.
After giving it a good clean, Prof Wilson turned the big bin into a small version of a typical home. It was scant living at first, with water being lugged up all the way from the local lake every few days. But things progressed quickly, and just yesterday, Prof Wilson gave the shell's interior a lick of paint, and picked a "full selection of ripe and sweet baby tomatoes, collard greens, okra and various herbs" from the so-called Dumpster Garden.
Phase two and three of the design will see a shower, toilet, multiple stories, and appliances like a washing machine, dryer, and a hot water heater introduced, all of which will use 1 per cent of the energy an average American home uses.
More: See the latest floor plans here
"In the end I want that space capsule to be designed to a standard that even my mother would give it a go for a night," Prof Wilson told MailOnline.
Since moving in on February 4, Prof Wilson has battled leaky roofs, bucket-style showers, his dumpster being carted off by the council, and an ex-wife who refuses to let his daughter sleep over.
"My ex-wife did not express a lot of encouragement in our (six-year-old) daughter sleeping with daddy in a dumpster," he told Fast Company. "So that's not gonna happen."
But Prof Wilson likes to think of his new home as "as luxury camping — we've got a convertible roof that opens under the Austin stars, a Persian carpet, and a super rad ornamental cactus welded from old dumpster parts," he writes on his blog.
"It will allow us to do some interesting experiments, like dropping it on a kid's playground and seeing what happens. Because they're going to open the door and see an Xbox, a bed, a shower, all these things."
Prof Wilson firmly believes that skips are metaphors for our careless attitudes towards energy use.
"Dumpsters are ubiquitous, yet unseen," he told the Mail. "They're these magic boxes where you throw what you don't want and it disappears.
"This is a grand experiment on living in less space with the hypothesis that one can have a happy, fulfilling, and productive life. It may turn out that it's an absolutely fab arrangement. Or, it might not. We'll see."
Take a look:
Read more about The Dumpster Project.
Donate towards the project on Kickstarter.
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