Bright blue and white fire sparks flash on either side of Pakayla Biehn’s gray face shield in the Academy of Art Institute’s welding studio. Wearing heaving boots and a large suede coat, the student sculptor is welding the structure to what will form a four-foot mailbox with a monster leaping out that will be covered with papier-mâché.

“Junk mail is pointless. It’s such a lost form of advertising…especially since people don’t even look at it. They just throw it away,” Biehn says, adjusting her eagle bandana that’s wrapped around her forehead and holding her blond wavy hair away from her face. Her cheeks are red from laughing with the exception of a black smudge of soot from the burnt metal on her nose.

Biehn is working with fellow sculptors Rex Waters and Zach Roberts on the 30-pound, 6-foot metal wire monster for the Stop Junk Mail Campaign put on by The Bay Area Recycling Outreach Coalition (BayRoc) and the San Francisco Department of the Environment. The organizations contacted the Academy of Art students to create pieces incorporating junk mail.

Taking a break from their classes and projects, the three artists congregate around Rex Waters’ sketches in the Academy sculpture building by the Chinatown gates in Union Square. The pen-drawn monster with shark-like jaws is being sucked into several mailboxes.

“We wanted to incorporate this huge problem into a large form yet keep it simple,” says Waters.

Zach Roberts finishes Waters’ statement. “We didn’t want to have a bunch of puppies crawling out of the mailboxes,” he chuckles.

Over time the paper drawing becomes a three-dimensional, 30-pound monster—they’ve finished the wire skeleton, color separated 300 pounds of mail, and started gluing the “muscle” onto the metal mailbox.

“Can we put eyelashes on it?” Biehn asks sweetly.

“Yeah-No,” the guys say simultaneously.

Time management is at the core of their challenges. It’s hard for them to juggle work and four other class projects, but they believe the project will benefit them through exposure. It’s not just about exposure, though. It’s about three artists having creative freedom and conveying a message.

“I think it's very profound to make green art—something that has beauty, is easily accessible and has strong social commentary. This project opens the publics eyes to our consumption and misuse of the planet's resources without preaching to the audience,” says Biehn.

“This [environmental issue] was already made out for us, we just had to screen it out,” says Roberts.

The original concept incorporated several mailboxes into the design, but the team decided it would look too cluttered so they brought the number down to one.

“This problem is coming from several areas and a lot of people. It’s not just one dude in Iowa with a big mailbox,” Waters jokes. “By using junk mail, we’re using the problem to promote a solution.”

Every year, 42 billion scraps of junk mail are sent to U.S. homes, killing over 100 million trees, which amounts to one and a half trees per household a year. Residents also spend $370 million a year to trash unsolicited mail that doesn’t even get recycled, so BayRoc and SF Department of the Environment, along with 110 Bay Area cities and counties, put together an anti-junkmail package with postcards that people can use to take their names off mailing lists.

“The California waste hierarchy is [to] recycle, reduce, reuse, but the focus is usually on recycling. There are very few campaigns that focus on reduction,” says David Assmann, deputy director at the San Francisco Department of Environment.

Stopjunkmail.org, a website that offers the kit, makes it easy for interested recipients to download letters, enclose one dollar, and send the letters to mail list organizations. In January, the organization received 320,691 requests. Two months ago, Waters ordered the package from stopjunkmail.org and addressed sample letters to various solicitors. He has yet to see less junk, he says.

According to Assmann, it should take at least three months. From March to June of 2005, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) surveyed twelve households who used the reduction kits. The Junk Mail Reduction Project report states that after residents sent out postcards, their unwanted mail decreased by 52 percent.

Since April 2006, fourteen states, including Arkansas and Hawaii, have tried to pass anti-junk mail legislation. For the proposals, 75,000 members of the Center For a New American Dream petitioned Congress. Sean Sheehan, the special projects director at the environmental organization in Vermont says, “It was a real grass roots effort. Our strategy was to influence our members who were concerned [about junk mail] to get their states involved,” he says.

White goop drips off Roberts’ and Waters’ blue gloves as they attach wet newspaper onto the mailbox.

“No matter what, we are going to win,” says Ruben Guzman, another artist working on a different sculpture for the project.

The campaign has commissioned two other sculptures to be created by the sculpture department. The graphic design, fashion, interior architecture and design, and industrial design departments are also creating pieces that will be displayed in February at the Art Academy’s 79 Gallery at 79 New Montgomery St.

The artists believe that working on a project focused on social issues has larger implications than jumpstarting their careers.

“Nobody is ever going to look at an art piece and think [of the concept] exactly the same way you were thinking when you started it,” Waters says.

“The idea that we are trying to get across is more important,” Rex says. “Yes, we hope to make careers [as artists], but the junk mail problem is even more important. [This project] is giving the problem a face and bringing it to life. If people don’t get it, we didn’t do our job.”