American artists DJ Neff and Paul Ramirez have teamed up under the collaborative alias – CANLOVE, to collect discarded spray paint cans and process them into works of fine art in an attempt to reduce the devastating impact that hazardous waste has on the environment.

CANLOVE is an effort, to use spray paint down to the last marble. Taking an otherwise discarded object and repurposing it to make sure it doesn’t end up in another landfill.  Street art as a culture is already full of mindful artists, that have also up cycled their cans like CANLOVE has, and it’s a beautiful thing.

In a world that continues to generate more and more trash, spray paint is among the lot. And since it is a hazardous material, it has become problematic with conventional recycling.  Many times spray paint ends up being burned or ends up in landfills, because they are pressurised cans filled with paint.

Much like our own, CANLOVE’s mission is to leave no can behind. For the past 10 years Neff & Ramirez have worked with artists and businesses to take their cans and make them into something more.

To give love to something otherwise useless, is to give it new life. To date, CANLOVE has had various art exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and London.

News just in: Aluminium in KING! According to a study published on Detritus in October 2020 that was conducted by professors Alice Brock & Ian D Williams (University of Southampton in the UK), recycled aluminium cans were the least environmentally damaging single-use container available. Brock & Williams compared five different types of pressurised drink containers and ranked them from least to most sustainable, according to their impact on the environment. They found that aluminium can be constantly recycled with no change in properties while saving 95% of the energy used to make a new can and no new material needs to be mined or transported. Professor Alice Brock, continued by saying, “aluminium cans contribute less to global warming than glass and plastic because making them consumes less energy and resources.” It’s safe to say that aluminium cans take the sustainability cup once again.