enerally speaking, tossing last year's trash upon the exterior of an exhibit is a major faux pas. But for German design firm Atelier Damboeck Messebau GmbH, making glamour out of garbage at EuroShop 2011 fell right in line with the company's "greenstands" initiative, which focuses on creating eco-friendly exhibits while striving for a carbon-neutral trade show presence.

So to call attention to its new Green efforts, the company scooped up some of the scraps and unused items from previous shows and plastered the materials to two of the exhibit's 16-foot-tall exterior walls. From afar, it looked like a post-modern art installation with layers of green, silver, and brown objects on a stark-white surface. Closer inspection revealed that the textured exterior comprised bits of repurposed Damboeck detritus: folders, paint buckets, computers and monitors, antiquated phones, and acrylic letters from old company signage.

Beyond the eye-catching waste-clad walls rose a set of stairs made from repurposed chipboard, which led to an open bar where a video projector flashed eco-friendly words like "sustainable" and "energy-efficient" upon the wall beside the bar. Meanwhile, the bar's flooring was made using recycled shards of glass lit from below to create a warm ambiance. The elevated bar space emptied into an enclosed sunken lounge that featured two unique walls - one fabricated from repurposed chopped-oak panels and another coated with live moss. Meanwhile, a wall-mounted 103-inch monitor displayed many of Damboeck's previous exhibit-design projects.

"The interior of this booth sings," said one Exhibit Design Awards judge. "But, the exterior has that kind of 'gawkable' factor that no doubt made attendees stop and take notice." Who knew that rubbish could rise to such ecologically responsible and ravishing heights? e