This small non-profit organization consists of a manager, two designers, a dressmaker, a technical director and two multiskilled workshop operatives. It is installed at Veolia Environmental Services' Gennevilliers site so as to be close to the raw materials it uses.
Thanks to the team's imaginativeness, the workshop is furnished with a coffee table made from an old tree trunk, while a sheet of Plexiglass and two wooden boxes serve to make a meeting room table. In a corner, the sewing workshop is a treasure trove of color and the floor is painted a dreamy sky blue.
The inventiveness of the two designers is completed by the talent of the workshop operatives, who are there under subsidized-employment contracts. They sand down, cut and varnish the wood to bring to life the designers' ideas.
All these production resources are there to serve a project for helping people to return to mainstream society. The operatives are assisted in both their personal and professional lives in the aim of finding a full-time job at the end of their six-month contract. By 2010, the non-profit hopes to welcome four extra people under subsidized-employment contracts.
Convinced that scrap objects are an immense source of stimulation for the imagination, the team offers a multitude of solutions for using them. A tarp becomes a shopping trolley, bed slats are turned into a coat stand, old parquet flooring becomes a desk, and so on. There are also 20 tons of mail service sacks that will be used in every conceivable way, as document holders, pen pots, bags, you name it... To reduce our environmental footprint, only environmentally friendly processes and products are used.
ExtraMuros also opens its doors to individual customers to turn their waste into a resource!
You can see the products on www.extramuros-paris.com.
