Painting Dumpsters

Jacob Schmidt, a teenager from Compton Heights, MO proposed the idea to paint the large industrial city dumpsters in his neighborhood, at his cost, to the Street Department of St. Louis using his designs to bring color and life back into the community and to give something pleasurable to look at rather than something dull and ugly. With the permission from the city to paint two dumpsters in his neighborhood, Schmidt began organizing his thoughts and fine tuning the proposal for his project. After receiving a warm response from the surrounding neighborhood, Schmidt approached the council with the idea of painting 100 dumpsters throughout the entire city of St. Louis. Being the dumpsters needed to be painted and the city council believed this to be a win-win situation, they voted unanimously to allow further development of the project. (Megan Reike) The Street Department was concerned that individuals may confuse the recycle dumpsters with trash dumpsters without having the traditional color palate, so as a preliminary test, Kent Flake, Street Commissioner for the city, whom genuinely loved the idea, awarded Schmidt with 25 dumpsters to paint.





While the city agreed to sandblast and prime the dumpsters, Schmidt was responsible for generating the funds for the necessary materials as well as finding a workforce to assist in the project. Schmidt went to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and every other social media page he could find for donations, volunteers, and ideas. He found the website KickStarter.com; which is a site that promotes ideas for projects and helps by collecting donations, pledges, and connecting volunteers with project planners. (KickStarter.com). Using the site, he managed to raise just over $4,000 to purchase materials: 80 gallons of paint, a couple dozen paint brushes, and 150 cans of spray paint.

It was through this site that artist Megan Reike and Schmidt found each other. Reike contacted him expressing great interest in the project and wanting to get involved and what she could do.

Jacob responded with, “You want to be a coach and help master plan the murals?”

“Of course, Yes, Heck yes!”(Mrs. Reike)

She was on board and the project was underway. Schmidt and Reike, via Facebook, held competitions for ideas for murals and came out with fabulous designs for their canvas.

<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin;mso-bidi-font-family: "TimesNewRoman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi">With approximately 20 volunteers Megan Reike and Jacob Schmidt began painting the dumpsters. The Dumpsters were 20 feet long by 8 feet tall, with protruding ribs and bars — not exactly a flat, perfect canvas. Schmidt's team of professional and amateur artists converted the Dumpsters into vistas of racing cyclists, sunbursts, abstract street scenes,   even a depiction of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball player. The volunteers had a lot of free range in regard to the composition of the murals as long as the content was neither offensive nor controversial.