NBCU gives new meaning to "Trash TV"

While the top execs at NBC Universal (GE) are consumed with closing their deal to merge into Comcast (CMCSA), they've found a little time to do some good for the planet. You can't miss this week's "Green is Universal" campaign if you watch CNBC (featuring Green Stocks to Watch) or the Tonight Show (Jay Leno races eco-friendly cars in the Ford (F) Green Car Challenge) or Top Chef, where the focus tonight is on organic and sustainable ingredients.

On Law & Order: SVU, they even make a big deal of switching to energy-efficient light bulbs. I'm not kidding.

While this eco-effort on screen gets pretty silly, there's a cool thing happening today inside NBCU--at Studio 8H, the home of Saturday Night Live. An environmental artist named Tom Deininger and a bunch of New York City middle-school students are building a massive mural out of trash that's re-purposed, recycled, or reclaimed from all around the company.

Measuring 8x36 feet, this is bona-fide TV trash: cue cards from Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, thousands of discarded CDs and DVDs, hundreds of NBC Sports tape cassettes.

I know about Deininger because he built one of his eco-murals out of 100% trash at Brainstorm Green, Fortune's confab last April. (Lonnie Lardner, a onetime TV news reporter whose Los Angeles-based firm Creative Voltage brought Deininger to Brainstorm Green, also works on art installations for the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.) Here's a shot of Deininger at work:

Photo courtesy of Rob Dunn

Deininger and the kids are supposed to finish their organized chaos at NBCU at 5pm today. Once it's done, we'll post a picture here on Postcards.