The New Sustainability Venue on Everyone’s Mind: ARCADIA EARTH

When Craig Perlmutter first visited the Arcadia Earth pop up happening in NYC, he never expected to someday be the President of the only permanent Arcadia Earth location in the world. Up until this point Perlmutter had spent 20 years running a children’s summer camp with his wife but this NYC pop up would leave a lasting impression on him.

Valentino Vettori, the creator of Arcadia Earth, vowed he would make some life changes and encourage others to do the same around the environment and sustainability. With a history of design in retail and a career understanding the fashion world saw how wasteful these spaces are. This led Vettori to create the pop up in NYC that sparked Perlmutter’s interest in sustainable ways.

Perlmutter shares that the New York exhibit lasted about three and a half years and closed in 2023. They also had a Vegas pop-up that recently closed making the Toronto space Perlmutter helped build the permanent home. The current Toronto Arcadia Earth location has several brightly coloured rooms all geared to educate people on sustainability, the environment and the planet. The rooms have art installations and also various spots where you can interact with your phone through the Arcadia Earth app to make items in the room change and receive more information about the planet.

Before finding the Arcadia Earth pop-up, Perlmutter might not have been the most sustainability focussed but did teach the kids at his summer camp about the environment, loving the planet, being gentle with mother nature. What he’s learned since walking through the original exhibit Perlmutter describes as a spider web of knowledge. “The room in New York that stuck with me the most was this room that was like, half the size of the space that we’re sitting in, maybe 400 to 500 square feet filled with all recycled plastic bags and really cool art installation, cool colours, cool sounds,  and it just felt neat. It smelled and felt like you’re in a cool different environment, not suffocating like it’s plastic, and there’s a voice that says, ‘This art installation created by Basia has 44,000 recycled plastic bags. This is the number of plastic bags used in the state of New York every minute’. I think after that room, I just like tuned in a lot more”. After that room, he was also handed an iPad to experience the Augmented Reality component which also increased his attention to these very important topics. After that he started the journey to help build Arcadia Earth in Toronto.

The Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality components also add an element to the space not yet seen at all museums in Toronto, but slowly becoming commonplace. Perlmutter shares that Vettori, who has seen so much waste previously used AR/VR as a means to use less materials. AR/VR was a new experience to Perlmutter four years ago when he walked into the NYC Pop-Up and enjoyed the experience and how those around him used the tech as well. “I couldn’t believe what was happening, and how you can interact at every age on your screen, like people do already. But now there’s something new and different. Kids of all ages walk through here, either with their families or with their schools, and interact on their device, and aren’t yelled at for using their device and screen time too much. Instead they learn on it and their eyes light up when they’re clicking on things and, for example, the coral comes up and then there’s a turtle swimming around them. We now have a colouring station where they can colour a couple of different colouring pages and scan it so that a manta ray or a turtle or a fish all of a sudden swim around the room, the one that they created and coloured”.

While there is an importance to give everyone information, the AR/VR also allows people to interact with nature in a different way. Perlmutter adds that these interactions help the information subconsciously get into their system, and he hopes they will the consciously make different choices in the world whether it’s reading labels when shopping, new tidbits of information about sustainability or even recognizing how some from older generations may have unknowingly contributed to the climate crisis we are currently in. Perlmutter shares that they plan to add more interactive moments throughout the space. 

All of the art and exhibits in the spaces are created with recyclable materials, and Perlmutter states that as they change the exhibits they will of course have to recycle or find ways to repurpose what is currently in the space. Of course finding the recyclable materials to build the current space was also not an easy feat. “Let’s take the e-waste room as an example that Benjamin Von Wong put together which is next level and has great messaging behind it.  He went to  a company called UniRecycle, which has hundreds of thousands of pounds of e waste and they strip all kinds of electronics when they get it in, and reuse parts and melted plastic and precious metals. and all that stuff.” Items such as keyboards, monitors and old phones go to companies like UniRecycle get recycled there, or in this instance used in an art installation. Perlmutter adds that it was a similar process to save the fishing gear for that themed room. Pamela Moulton, who’s an artist from the U.S. in Maine, knows people who clear the oceans of finish gear and she uses all of that, cleans it and paints it  and makes it into costumes and different art installations. The other artist featured in the space is Samuelle Green who worked on the Bee Thankful space.

Perlmutter shares that they have big plans for Arcadia Earth and the adaptability of the space was imperative to it’s longevity. “We built this so it can be changed. Depending on the room, every year, year and a half, maybe even some will last two years, we can change the rooms around – not easily, but we can change the rooms around the way that they’re built.” He adds the projection mapping and physical art installations can change. They previously did a call to artists for some of the art in the space and suspect they could do the same in the future. Not only are the rooms adaptable, but Perlmutter adds that there are topics untouched and events that will take place in the space, keeping Arcadia Earth busy!

Perlmutter hopes that everyone who steps foot into Arcadia Earth visits, possibly for various reasons, but leaves thinking of simple little daily lifestyle changes that they can make. Whether it’s reading labels better, using ReefSafe sunscreen, or thinking about your e-waste when you’re done with your phones which should last long after the next phone iteration is announced, helping with petitions like the right to repair, or reducing use of single use plastics – we all have a part we can play. He adds that he really appreciated that the original Arcadia Earth never made anyone feel bad about the choices they possibly made that weren’t the most environmentally friendly. “We’re not going to suddenly have no plastic on the planet, right? But if we can use 90 percent less plastic bags or water bottles, consider sustainable fishing practice and talking about bees and what people can plant at home to help pollinate – it’s a start. There are so many different types of things that we’re trying to cover. People aren’t gonna walk out and do ten different things but they’re gonna walk out and hopefully one or two things are gonna change.”

To experience Arcadia Earth and explore ways you can help make the planet better, visit: http://arcadiaearth.ca/  

Hillary LeBlanc

Hillary LeBlanc

Hillary is an Acadian-Senegalese queer woman passionate about sharing stories relating to the Black community, fashion, beauty and sustainability.
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