Turning Toxins Into Art | 'That's Amazing'

across the rust belt abandoned coal mines are leaching toxins into rivers and streams turning them shades of dirty red the color is disturbing but for two men it's also the tint of inspiration one is a civil engineer with plans to extract these toxins from the waters the other is a painter who transforms that material into acrylic paints and stunning works of art this part of southeastern ohio is considered appalachia and we have a strong relationship with the ohio river we have a strong relationship with all of the environmental destruction that's happened here the abandoned mines have irretrievably altered the watershed discharging acidic water into nearby streams and rivers due to a process known as acid mine drainage so just in ohio there's more than 1 300 stream miles that are impacted by acid mine drainage the mine that discharges here at this specific treatment site it's been abandoned for probably about 100 years fish and other aquatic life is really sensitive to ph and the streams get coated with this iron sludge this is the mine that we call the back gate mine seep and it has been pumping out acid mine drainage for the last hundred years now the toxic discharge at bat gate is the result of an abandoned improperly sealed coal mine it delivers about 4 000 pounds of iron every day into this one stream nearby that's like junking two cars into the stream every day what i'm doing in my research right now is trying to come up with a way to clean up streams in southeast ohio so through our research we've discovered that when we remove iron from the acid mine drainage we can precipitate it and settle it as a pigment and i realize that by producing pigment i could pay for this whole process when i got to the dry pigment i realized that i i didn't have the skills to figure out what made a good pigment and what made a bad pigment i basically was knocking on doors in the art department to see if i could find anyone to help me and that's when i ran into john i was like could you tell me if this was a good paint or not and we sat down and he said very scientific jargon well the pigment needs to be this and it needs to be then and i was like yeah i can do that but what we really need to do is make something that visually is compelling we need people to look at this and go what what are you doing that's crazy and get on board [Music] one of the things that i really liked about getting the pigment from these acid mine seeps is that it has characteristics of the place where you get it from so from guy i would come back and say well this is too orange i want it to be a deeper red because it's more valuable for these reasons once i get the pigment from the lab i put it onto a tempered glass table i'll add an oil dispersant for there which basically makes the pigment want to stick to things so it wants to become a good paint and then that can be scraped up into jars or tubes and you can use oil paint for years and years and years and years he makes these connections between nature and pollution and science and he puts that in in this something that is beautiful to see we've had recent interest from gambling artist colors in portland and we are producing a custom batch of the color 500 tubes of oil paint with our name on it the proceeds from selling the pigment will pay for the plant it will pay for employees they'll pay for the cleanup of a stream the moment that the plant becomes viable that is the moment that the stream goes back to biological viability it's not a 10-year thing it's not a 20-year thing it's not a 50-year thing it's a tomorrow kind of thing artists are not people who create from themselves but they actually serve a role as communicators for the divine in the universe i'm always thinking about these colors and how they relate to where it came from thanks to the team's efforts in september of 2016 john was invited to exhibit his art at the united nations in new york city i'm very lucky to be invited to have a show at the united nations headquarters and what i'm really hoping to do is to form even more collaborations with people in many places around the world where we're all working towards this goal of a more sustainable planet [Music] you

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 173,820

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, That's Amazing, Weather Channel, The Weather Channel, Athens, Ohio, Toxic, Pollution, Art, Artist, Rust Belt, America, United States, acrylic, paint, John Sabraw, Guy Riefler, Civil engineer, Nature & Animals, Arts & Entertainment, Tech & Science

Id: uJv6WtfxLUk

Length: 4min 52sec (292 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2016