Gates Material Now Plastic Picket Fences

The Post reports that, true to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s word, the plastic material in the Gates frame supports has been recycled — as picket fences that will be sold to home owners in the midwest, southeast and Canada:

Seven months after the towering orange frames that lined the walkways of Central Park came down, they’ve been reborn as white fence posts framing yards across the United States and Canada.

The project’s path from high-concept art in the Big Apple to unrecognizable fencing in Anytown, U.S.A., began on Feb. 27, when artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude began taking down the 7,500 gates that had filled the park with orange — and an estimated 4 million visitors.

. . .

First off, the disassembled artwork was shipped to a Queens warehouse.

Then the vinyl and nylon were shipped to Nicos Polymers & Grinding Inc. in Nazareth, Pa.

While the fabric was shredded and respun, making it untraceable, the framing, which was the bulk of the project, was ground down into 500,000 pounds of hard-to-hide bright orange vinyl chips.

. . .

The metal parts ended up with Hugo Neu, whose Jersey City scrap yard handles all of New York’s recyclable metal. There it was melted down and sold all over the world.

Nicos soon found a buyer for those blindingly orange chips in Plastival Inc., a major manufacturer of vinyl railing, fencing and synthetic lumber.

What was left of “The Gates” was remade at the company’s Chicago factory into fencing.

The company mixed the orange with white vinyl. What they ended up with were fence posts that are white on the outside, but with a bright orange core.

“Anyone who bought this would have no idea, unless they looked inside the posts,” said Plastival CEO Guy David.

Plastival sells its product, at roughly $100 a 6-by-6-foot panel, primarily through construction-supply chains including Lowe’s in the Southeast, Menards in the Midwest, and Home Depot in Canada.