Waste Age: designers should begin designing with the minimisation of waste as their prime goal
A plastic bag discovered at a depth of approximately 3,700 metres around the Enigma Seamount during a 2016 exploration of the Mariana Trench.
A fascinating long essay on Aeon by the Design Museum’s chief curator, Justin McGuirk, on. how design must put waste - the fact we produce it, and its minimisation - at the centre of its concerns. A short extract below:
…If every product was evaluated in terms of how much waste it generated or how brief its lifespan was likely to be, it would transform the discipline [of design], and consumer behaviour along with it. In many cases, those objects would not be brought into being in the first place.
But how can designers implement strategic change when they must fulfil the briefs of their paymasters? The last thing any manufacturer or politician wants is reduced production. Well, in that case, designers need to convince them.
The designer’s powers of persuasion lie in making change manifest in tangible forms. Take the built environment, which accounts for 38 per cent of all carbon emissions when you factor in construction and energy use. We know that the most sustainable building is the one that already exists, and yet developers are still incentivised to demolish and build anew.
The architects Lacaton and Vassal in Paris view demolition not just as waste but as a form of violence against the environment. In their transformation of social housing blocks that were once slated for demolition, they have demonstrated numerous times that such buildings can be adapted in ways that don’t just improve the architecture but also the residents’ quality of life.
This is a powerful act of persuasion because it gives other municipalities the precedent they need when they are under pressure to demolish a run-down tower block.
These acts of persuasion are happening across every design discipline:
Architects building taller structures with cross-laminated timber show that it’s possible to move away from carbon-heavy and hugely polluting construction mainstays such as steel and concrete.
In consumer electronics, companies such as Fairphone and Framework design smartphones and laptops with modular parts, so that everything from batteries and cameras to motherboards can be replaced as they decline or evolve.
While Apple and Microsoft have long used proprietary screws, glues and all manner of other strategies to prevent repair (though they’ve recently amended their policies somewhat), Fairphone and Framework are setting an ethical standard that one hopes consumers will find persuasive.
In fashion, which is believed to be the second or third most polluting industry in the world, designers such as Stella McCartney, Bethany Williams and Phoebe English are demonstrating that it is possible to create desirable clothes out of recycled materials, dead stock and waste textiles.
Granted, all of the above are still outliers – minnows in the mainstream – but their power lies in helping us see what a great abstraction such as ‘decarbonisation’ can look like at the everyday level.
As the public becomes more aware and more discerning, manufacturers will feel greater pressure to change – and more fundamentally than today’s epidemic of greenwashing suggests. But if the principles outlined above were widespread, it would challenge the industrial paradigm of the past 100 years.
The 2017 transformation of the social housing complex Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux in France by the architects Lacaton & Vassal. Photo by Laurian Ghinitoiu
What does a society look like in which fridges last 50 years,not five? Where individual ownership of goods is replaced by communal sharing? Where distributed manufacturing is the norm, such that distant factories and global supply chains give way to more local, bioregional and artisanal production, close to the point of purchase?
What are the implications of a world in which some products last forever and others, made of organic materials, decompose in days?
Our aesthetic sensibilities might have to adapt. After nearly a century of appreciating the hard-smooth-shiny perfection of plastics, we might need to embrace irregularity, imperfection, decay and decomposition.
Many of these ideas and the products that could spring from them are nascent or niche. Critics will say ‘How do you scale that up?’ – to which we could retort that this impulse towards expansion is part of the problem. In the end, perhaps bigness is best replaced by myriad small-scale solutions.
There is hope, of sorts, in mushrooms. Mycelium has become the experimental material du jour, used in everything from bricks to handbags, but that is not the hope that I was referring to. Rather, it’s the fungus as a metaphor – an organism that can not only survive but even thrive in damaged landscapes, and help to restore them.
The American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has written compellingly about the ability of the matsutake mushroom to revive pine forests that have been ravaged by fire. ‘Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes,’ she writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), ‘allows us to explore the ruin that has become our collective home.’
Mycorrhizal fungi create symbiotic networks with tree roots, nourishing them and enabling life after ecological catastrophe. This is a powerful demonstration of what Tsing calls ‘entangled ways of life’, and it is precisely that entanglement that designers are beginning to learn – the way in which every object is connected to the world, through myriad social and ecological processes, from raw material to waste material.
And just as the 20th century was a summer of plenty, when we could consume and discard with abandon, so the 21st century will be defined by an autumnal scarcity, in which we have to be more resourceful and sparing – keeping our eyes trained on the forest floor.