Dogs on the Street

Dogs on the Street is an art/ protest / propaganda / idea

Dogs on the street are an art idea. It started when I realised how much cardboard is sent for recycling by business and shops in the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Every day tones of perfectly good cardboard are recycled in my city. I started to ask myself ‘is needless recycling worse than no recycling’?

Needless Recycling

Needless recycling happens when a company buys and uses recycled cardboard boxes and then sends the used boxes for recycling to make other cardboard boxes. If you think about it, NOT recycling the box uses less energy than constantly returning it for recycling. At first I thought this was a stupid idea, that no company would really do this but the more I researched and thought about it the more I began to realise it was true. If there is nothing wrong with the box, why not re-use it?

Lets make stuff out of it instead!

I was trying to think how I could make a point and make some art at the same time. I came up with the idea ‘Dogs on the Street’. The title comes form a political phrase often used in Northern Ireland, “Even the dogs on the street know…’. I decided to borrow cardboard from the piles of boxes left in front of shops and make cardboard dogs sculptures out of them, based on a toy I bought my son. I would then return the dogs to the spot that I borrowed the boxes. In this way I could highlight the continued use of the box in some other way other than continually recycling it.

Passers by have taken my Sculptures; they have been lifted by the refuge collectors, jumped on by children and destroyed in the rain. Either way my work and the idea are out there. I started a Facebook page /dogsonthestreet and the reception is fantastic. I would like to take this idea to cities around the world.


David Turner is an Artist living in Belfast, Northern Ireland / UK