Living in the Waste Age
What can design do for the future of waste?
Written by Craig Berry
Designer & Writer
“We are living in the age of waste. Is design the answer to leaving our throwaway culture behind?” The poigniant question posed by the Design Museum upon launching their new exhibition, Waste Age: What can design do?
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that we as a society, across the globe, have a waste problem. Globally we produce two billion tonnes of rubbish each year, seven times the weight of the world’s adult population with only 15% of this being recycled. Despite 20 years of initiatives to reduce waste we are only consuming more, throwing away more and recycling less.
This exhibition looks at the impact of waste on the planet and how designers can (and should) play an active role in how consumer’s behave regarding waste, exploring what design can do to rethink the way we produce and consume goods, how waste can be transformed into valuable resources with new materials and systems and looking at new ways that we can live with nature.
The exhibition opens with a confronting and impossible to ignore figures about how much we, as a planet, waste: 4.5 trillion cigarette butts a year, each one releasing plastic and chemicals into the environment. Plastic drinks bottles that make up 25% of UK litter collected from our streets, parks and beaches. 100,000 plastic bags are produced every second, the average lifetime use of each bag is 12 minutes. £12.5 billions worth of clothing was thrown away in 2017. And only one in 400 coffee cups are recycled with 1.5 billion litres of water required to make them.
These kinds of numbers really make you think, are we doing enough to reduce of waste.
“We must face the problem of waste — we can no longer ignore what happens to things when we get rid of them. Instead of thinking of objects as things that have an end life, they can have many lives. This is not just an exhibition it is a campaign, and we all have an active part in our future.”
Gemma Curtin, Design Musuem Curator.
The most ‘popular’ method of reducing waste is to recycle, it’s probably the first thing people will suggest when thinking about waste and the planet. But there’s more to it than that, take a coffee cup for example. Recycling is the act of converting waste into a new reusable material; recycling a coffee-cup into a new coffee cup, but that takes valuable energy and resources; what if we just choose to re-use, instead of binning that coffee cup, re-fill it numerous times. Better still, what if we choose to reduce and not even have that coffee cup need to be used (or made) in the first place by using a coffee cup that is valuable and not designed for a single use.
Reduce, Re-use, Recycle are the three R’s to minimise wastage, known best for the meaning of the international symbol of recycling, designed by Gary Anderson in 1970. But today we need to look even further than just these three, and begin to Refuse; to not be complacent when it comes to how we use products, to Re-think; to educate and inform ourselves about how we use products and to Recover; to reap the benefits of the above and maintain this level of sustainable recovery.
A few years ago, Two Degrees° Creative put out and open call on for designers to submit their impression of the original 1970 symbol. My submission, a circle made with six arrows in a never-ending loop showed the cyclical nature of managing waste, each arrow representing an R, each an important part of the cycle.
Often our relationship with waste is a happy “out of sight, out of mind” mentality aka if we can’t see it, it’s not a problem, which is obviously not the case. It’s also that when we hear about the sheer figures of the amount of waste we produce and the damage it causes to the planet, it’s such high numbers that it’s incomprehensible, but ometimes it takes someone else to show you, to open your eyes. Edward Burtynsky’s photographic series do just that.
For years he has been capturing a birds-eye view of the impact of human activity from huge landfill sites that show piles upon piles of plastic and waste to enormous blemishes in nature where we have ripped open the planet to mine for minerals for our devices
Of course, the main part of this exhibition, and the point of it being at the Design Museum is to see what designers can do to fight the fight against waste. And there are numerous ways.
Firstly, can designers change our minds about waste?
“Design has helped create our wasteful society, and it will be crucial in building a cleaner future. There is so much we can do, but it begins with understanding our waste.”
Justin McGuir, Design Museum Co-curator
Each year we use more resources than our planet can regenerate, we need 1.75 planet Earths to support our current demands, we simply cannot keep using new resources because they’re better. Waste we produce can be a great material itself to create things of value, “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” is totally right. The most obvious example that comes up time after time is the Adidas x Parley collection, (originally just a) shoe, constructed completely from discarded and reclaimed fishing nets; it has received a lot of press, and rightly so, but to me; it’s not a desirable product as there is something about it that looks like it’s obviously recycled (it’s made from nets and looks like nets) and the cynic in me would prefer something made from recycled products that doesn’t obviously look like it’s made from recycled products.
Snøhetta’s S–1500 chair, for me, does just that. Together with Nordic Comfort Products (NCP), the architecture firm has designed a chair that has genuine aesthetic value. Manufactured using 100 % recycled plastic from the local fish farming industry for the seat and a frame made from recycled steel the S–1500 chair has a beautiful texture that alludes to its recycled nature but does not yell. The colour coming from the nets but with a marbled, wave-like pattern imbued into it, the design tells the story of plastic that has been on a journey from the sea to a home.
Can designers reclaim precious resources?
Wealthy countries around the world have very few shortages for their people; one of which is waste; which is constantly growing in amount. One of the ways that designers can work with waste is to reduce the amount of waste by reclaiming precious resources from our human activity and thus hopefully transforming this into useful, meaningful and desirable products. This not only reduces waste but the amount of virgin material needed to be extracted from the planet. It’s a method of recycling that goes beyond turning plastic bottles into new plastic bottles.
One project that caught my eye was by The Tyre Collective; a group of engineers and scientists who have developed a device that can collect micro-plastics at their source. This particular project was a device that can be attached to car wheels; capturing 60% of all airborne particles of tyre wear, something that you probably never considered as a waste product but it so obviously is. Small bits of rubber and plastic that come off each tyre every day as they make contact with the road surface through braking and turning, each tyre particle is a pollutant that makes its way into our lungs and waterways.
The Tyre Collective’s device is a simple one which, in their prototype on show, looks quite normal and you could easily see it being fitted to a modern car. They aim to passively collect these tyre wear particles and transform them into useful products such as shoe soles, playground surfaces and rubber bricks.
Can designers make things last so they have a longer life and new things are not needed?
“They don’t make them like they used to” gets thrown around a lot when talking about the longevity and lifespan of products and it’s true, many things are no longer made to last. A great example of this is the iPhone which are designed to last only three years although people notice a considerable difference in only two. Recently Apple have only been encouraging this quicker degrading by purposefully slowing down older devices; encouraging people to purchase new ones. In 2020 Apple was fined $27million for admitting to doing this deliberately and in 2021 a $60million lawsuit was filed for the same reason.
Only towards the end of 2021 did Apple introduce a scheme to allow consumers to fix their own products by purchasing parts from them, using their repair guide and tools. Previously this was only possible through Apple or authorised repair shops. This means Apple is trusting people to fix their own devices but also means people don’t have to now go out of their way to have their products fixed which previously would have put them off doing so, and buying new.
A product that goes further, however, is Framework’s Laptop (which looks very similar to Apple’s MacBooks) which, when bought, comes with a single screwdriver; the only tool needed to take the laptop apart for home repairs. Framework also produce a DIY edition of their laptop, whch is the “only high-end notebook available as a kit of modules”. This allows you the consumer to choose and swap components in the laptop ranging from form to function i.e. different coloured screen frames and keyboards to different ports and keyboard language layouts. This kind of design has to be the future of laptop design.
I do believe modularity is the key to this kind of sustainable design; allowing consumers to change and replace each part on their products when they either break or they become bored of the look. The headphones I choose to wear by Danish brand AIAIAI, do just this and it’s something that I have used to no end. These headphones, with interchangeable parts, can go from a regular commuter headphones to high-end DJ headphones, from a 2m long cable to a bluetooth connection, from on-ear to over ear. I myself have several pieces that I swap and change for occasion; replacing the need for several pairs.
Can designers visualise waste/material consumption in a meaningful way?
When we look at a product most people will only see that, the product; a car is a car, a phone is just a phone etc. But that’s obviously not the case; almost every human-made product is made from numerous materials, some you would think and others perhaps not.
Designers (and artists) have the ability to take this information and translate it into a meaningful and beautiful pieces of work which can educate us as consumers of how these products come together. An example on show is by the Dutch designers Studio Drift and their project, MATERIALISM. This project aims to catalogue ever component used to make very familiar products, each one represented in a rectangular block. his thorough investigation links these products and their materials to the natural world from which they come.
In conclusion, it’s not what designers can do to tackle our waste problem but what designers should be doing. Designers cannot sit back and continue to design for manufacturers without any thought about the impact of waste.
Recently I wrote a blog post about sustainable fashion: Reshaping Fashion, looking at Nike’s Space Hippie range, a great example of what leading designers are doing in this fight.
One of the questions that I couldn’t stop thinking about during the exhibition was, what about this exhibition itself? How did the Design Museum justify the waste of this exhibition and how was it going to eventually remove this in a meaningful way that pays attention to the exhibition itself. My question was answered at the very end though.
- The whole exhibition weighs roughly 500kg and the average distance travelled is 1,100km (many from London) thus the logistics footprint is less than 20kg or 0.2% of the total footprint.
- 10% of the total footprint is associated with digital communication; 11,000 emails (11GB) equating to 1 ton C02e.
- The exhibition build itself is made using 4,800 stainless steel screws, around 20% of the exhibition footprint.
- A timber frame is used instead of an aluminium frame, reducing the environmental impact by two thirds.
- Using unfired bricks instead of fired bricks saved 6 tons of C02e.
- After the exhibition, numerous materials will be returned such as unfired bricks to brick makers to put back into their mix and timber wood can be turned into MDF/OSB boards.
Waste Age: What can design do? is on display until the end of February 2022 and is worth a visit, if you’re interested in sustainability and the future of design.
Read more blog posts on craig-berry.co.uk or my Medium page.
