Any one of these bizarrely named churches could be in your hometown though they appear to hale from an altered state… pray we do not “altar” them further.

Prayer House Rock

Elvis may have left the building but he left a half-eaten peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich on the collection plate. Welcome to the 24-hour Church of Elvis, a Portlandia attraction that isn’t really a church and has no known affiliation with The King’s estate. On the other hand, the eclectic storefront at 408 NW Couch is the self-stated “Worlds first 24-hour coin-operated Art Gallery” so at least it’s a profitable enterprise… like most churches. (images via brx0 and Steve Schroeder)

Let the Spirit Move You

Here’s the Palm Bible Church in Soweto, South Africa, whose sign out front bears the perplexing slogan “The Move of God”. Somehow we doubt that refers to Sunday being a popular moving day but hey, we’ve been wrong before. Let’s move on. (image via Paul Birnie)

Sin In Stranger

“Sin will find you out”? Hoo boy, that ship sailed a LONG time ago! Perhaps a better – or at least, more enticing – slogan might read “Salvation lies within”. We get it, though: neon signs don’t come cheap and like The Godfather says, fear can be a potent motivator. (image via Sam Lavy)

Pews ‘R Us

When they say “Find It Here”, they don’t mean sin… OK, depends on what type of used furniture you’re buying and what purpose it’s to be used for. Wait, you may be asking, what does used furniture have to do with a church? We can only shrug our shoulders and refer you to “Bill”… if you can find him. (image via Julia TortoiseHugger)

Fertile Pastors

The New Dimensions Worship Center might be “A Place of New Beginnings” but if their sign’s any indication, it’s also the scene of many happy endings. Gotta give ’em credit, though: while other churches advise that laying in bed on Sunday morning shouting “OH GOD!” doesn’t constitute going to church, New Dimensions replies “Why not both?” (image via David Smith)

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Non Saints 10 More Bizarrely Named Churches

Waterproof and windproof seem like small bonus features next to the dazzling look of this jacket design, the shell of which is covered in microscopic spheres that mimic the adaptive camouflage of squids.

Developed by Vollebak, this high-tech creation used lasers to embed these tiny balls into resin along the triple-layered surface of the garment, creating a slick metallic oil-like effect by day and then a dazzling spectrum of reflective wonder at night.

“The Black Squid Jacket focuses on replicating the elements of squid skin that make it hyper-visible,” explains the designer. Whereas “a squid uses microscopic plate-like structures on the surface of its skin to change color, our jacket uses disruptively-structured microscopic glass spheres.’

“When light hits the jacket, it travels through the curved surface of these black glass spheres and strikes the back of them, before being reflected back at the original light source and scattered away from it simultaneously, so that the fabric looks like it’s emitting light.”

Recycling isn’t going to solve our waste problems. Between the contamination that happens when we don’t recycle correctly and the degradation of plastic over time, it’s a band-aid at best, and millions of pounds of “recyclable” materials end up in landfills no matter which bin we put them in. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should just accept plastic pollution (including the micro plastics that litter the oceans and our own bodies) as a fact of life. But it does mean we have to change our approach.

Recyclability Doesn’t Matter Anymore

According to the most recent EPA stats available (which are from 2015), the amount of plastic waste generated in the United States is actually rising. Up to 70% of plastic entering recycling facilities around the world is unusable, and some of it – like plastic bags – gums up the machines, ruining entire loads of potentially recyclable materials.

If you’re wondering where our plastic goes when it doesn’t get recycled, a recent Guardian report from 11 countries tracked how waste from the U.S. makes its way around the world. Hundreds of thousands of tons of it, from plastic bottles to e-waste, are shipped every year to impoverished countries like Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal in what is essentially a new form of colonization.

We don’t know how to deal with it, so we put it all on ships and send it “away,” where it becomes someone else’s problem, spilling out into their own natural spaces. The toxic fumes that can result from burning or processing plastics contain substances like dioxins, heavy metals and hydrochloric acid.

It’s easy to blame all of this on consumers not taking the time to properly sort recyclables. But the recyclability of plastics can be arcane even to people who are well-educated on the topic, since facilities vary in the types of plastic they’re able to take, and the numbers printed on containers within that meaningless mobius loop recycling symbol don’t necessarily tell us whether they’re accepted by local waste processors.

Planning for a Circular Economy

The solution to all of this is actually pretty simple. The manufacturers who produce products, packaging and even architecture in the first place should have their own plans and systems to take it back when its usefulness to the consumer has ended. Moving toward a circular economy with a closed-loop system would place the responsibility for the waste produced by a given object in the hands of its manufacturer, driving motivation to come up with less wasteful solutions in the first place.

There’s no shortage of innovation when it comes to plastic alternatives that aren’t made of fossils fuels. Among the solutions that have already been proposed are edible seaweed-based materials, bioplastics made of arthropod shells, biodegradable combinations of cellulose and natural resins, mushroom-based foam and more. Some of them, like Sulapac, can be produced on existing production lines, so if companies really wanted to, they could instantly switch from their current plastic materials to a sustainable alternative.

But biodegradable plastics can pose problems of their own. While we might imagine that disposable tableware marked “compostable” is better than plastic or styrofoam, it can still end up in the ocean, where it takes years to break down and can potentially endanger wildlife. It also has to be sent to special industrial composting facilities, which don’t exist in every area. The thing is, with the possible exception of edible or plant-based options like banana leaves, few of these biodegradable innovations actually help if they’re still being used to produce single-use disposable items.

Individual actions still matter, and a big piece of the puzzle is changing our own thinking around convenience and the value of durability, but ultimately, like with climate change, we can’t let corporations off the hook. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988, and 20 companies represent the world’s biggest plastic polluters, including energy companies, beverage behemoths and meat and dairy processors. They have the money and the power to dramatically reduce pollution of all kinds.

Few companies are going to take the initiative to do this until we reach a critical mass of consumer demand, putting pressure on corporations to take responsibility and following up with legislative action. In a time when we’re dealing with so many pressing crises at once, it might be difficult to imagine pulling that off, but at the risk of sounding trite, changing anything for the better starts with imagining the world we want to live in and working from there.

Top image: Mi Zhou’s soapack, which uses soap as zero-waste packaging for shampoo and other liquid toiletries.

Don’t touch that dial… these weird 70s bathroom music machines combined the utility of a toilet paper roll holder with the sweet sound of an AM radio.

Audio Waste Land

A visit to one’s parents or grandparents wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the “facilities”, where you stood (or sat, as the case may be) a fairly decent chance of finding a restroom radio. Encased in plastic dyed in unnatural hues apparently lifted from a 1958 DeSoto brochure, these incongruous yet ingenious multifunctional devices emerged at the end of a decade that witnessed one of mankind’s most historic accomplishments: landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

American Ingenuity

A mere 16 days after Armstrong and Aldrin left the first human footprints on another heavenly body, the United States Patent Office formally granted patent #214,839 to John F. Lewis of Hawthorne, CA for his “Combined Radio Cabinet And Toilet Paper Holder”. No doubt Lewis was greatly relieved, having applied for the patent almost ten months previously. As for Armstrong and Aldrin, presumably they were relieved as well once they could relieve themselves in Earth gravity again.

The Rolling Tones

It wasn’t long before a number of manufacturers (including “Stewart“, above) began pumping out restroom radios that generally hewed quite closely to Lewis’ patented design. Among the differences – some might say improvements – were same-sized Volume and Tuning dials and the relocation of the battery compartment to the top of the unit, protected by a snap-on cover. On the downside, the dials’ milled edges were tough to clean… yuck.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Rockn Rolls Retro Toilet Paper Roll Holder Radios

These days, “user experience” tends to refer more to the digital realm than our physical environment, but it’s no less relevant to roads and sidewalks than to websites and software. When creating something that people will interact with, no matter what it is, the goals are often the same: it should be useful, usable, accessible, findable, desirable and valuable (add “credible” when it comes to information). It gives you what you need, when you need it, in precisely the right form.

But in the process of designing something one hopes will be beautiful, sometimes user experience falls by the wayside. So-called “desire paths” are one example of what can happen as a result. Formed when people forge a path across unpaved land, regardless of any nearby walkways that may already exist, these paths are an organic and often unconscious form of urban hacking, when users decide what works best for them in the environments they occupy every day.

Who would’ve guessed from r/DesirePath

People made a desire pentagram inside a big roundabout. from r/DesirePath

Desire paths are almost like a litmus test for built environments; when they appear, they’re signaling that somewhere along the way, someone likely failed to determine what the design was supposed to do, and for whom. At its root, urban planning is a tool of social control, attempting to impose order upon the wild and intuitive, with a goal of producing an efficient system that’s easy to manage. Of course, it’s essential to maintaining the complexity of modern cities, and the grids and patterns that form the basis of most cities have their purposes, like streamlining traffic and navigation.

That may be fine when you’re driving, but walking is a different story. Most of us want efficiency when we’re walking, too, and that means cutting out unnecessary corners and curves along the way. Enormous pedestrian roundabouts might fit neatly within traffic circles and look nice from above, but when you’re just trying to get from point A to point B, spending the extra minutes it takes to keep to the concrete circle rather than cutting through the grass feels like a waste.

Illicit trails reveal a lot about a given place, the people who populate it, what their needs are and whether those needs are being met. That’s especially true when it comes to accessibility. Over time, it can become abundantly clear that ramps should be built for people who can’t navigate staircases (as it should have been from the very beginning).

A common miserable desire path found during a typical Canadian winter.

Blocked off alley doesn’t stop people. from r/DesirePath

Once you start looking for them, you’ll spot desire paths everywhere; there’s even a fascinating and enthusiastic subreddit devoted to them. They can change according to the weather, appearing when sidewalks get icy; snow can sometimes reveal invisible common paths taken to cut across hard surfaces like asphalt.

View from my dormitory, huge one with a fork at the end from r/DesirePath

Desire paths don’t always result from a design failure. Sometimes they just reflect the fact that people want to walk, run or bike on a natural surface instead of following pavement. Sometimes they illustrate the need for cities to be more adaptive; a system of sidewalks that worked twenty years ago stops serving its users when new popular destinations pop up in different spots along the way. And sometimes, when walkways are attempting to protect sensitive natural habitats, user-determined paths can be legitimately harmful.

A local college is trying to thwart this desire path by planting a tree in the middle of it. from r/DesirePath

The Oval walkways at Ohio State University were paved based on the students’ desire paths from r/DesirePath

My University giving into the desire path from r/DesirePath

Those in charge of determining the location and layout of official pedestrian paths may try to fight user-created routes with obstacles, but it’s a fool’s errand, much like trying to hold back the ocean. The paths will simply multiply. Rebellious in spirit, desire paths are a physical manifestation of the untamed parts of us that defy control by external systems. Sometimes there’s nothing for urban planners to do but accept the wisdom of the people who actually use the paths, and make them official.

Top image by wetwebwork/Flickr CC by 2.0