Written by DCist contributor Kelly Rand

With Leonardo DiCaprio riding around in a hybrid car and Al Gore winning an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, “green” seems to be all the rage these days. But glass artist Erwin Timmers was “green” before “green” was cool. Co-founder and director of the Washington Glass School and Studio, Timmers experiments with firing techniques to incorporate discarded tempered glass into his art, giving it new life and diverting it from the waste stream. DCist caught up with him after a talk at his show, “Re-Creation: A Green Artist’s View”, at Studio Gallery.

Throughout your career, you have worked with reclaimed and recycled materials. What brought you to that, and what do you like best about working with these materials?

The feeling inside. Using something that nobody else would use, that would probably end up in a trash heap somewhere. That already gives me a good feeling right there. Then, to be able to make something that other people respond to, something beautiful that draws in people. That is the icing on the cake. I think part of my recycling heritage also comes from my up bringing. I was born in Holland, raised in Holland. Holland is actually quite different from the United States. In fact, it is a very small country with very limited resources and everybody is very careful about what they use. Everybody turns off the light when leaving a room, turns off the heat when they leave the room, that sort of thing. And here, I rarely find that. Some of the installations we’ve done for wealthier people, who can afford chandeliers or art pieces, or general people in the suburbs I meet; that mentality is not there. They are more concerned about the way their environment looks; they are not so concerned with how they impact that environment.

I actually have this discussion with my wife sometimes, too. When it’s cold in the house, I’ll be the one to put on a sweater and she’s the one to turn up the heat. I liken it to how she likes to adapt her environment to her, whereas I like to adapt to my environment. I think it’s all a part of trying to minimize my impact on the environment, my footprint, they talk about these days, or carbon, or environmental footprint. I think that’s a great analogy, the smaller the footprint I make, the less of a problem trail I’ll leave behind later.