The Need to ‘Design Out Waste’

Posted on | September 20, 2008 |

Early thursday morning, on the sunlit banks of The Grand Union Canal, 25 people took residence on the Electric Barge to take a trip to Powerday waste recycling plant. Docked at Little Venice in Paddington, the electrically powered barge is a silently running and environmentally sound answer to canal travel.

After skipper Ian ironically removed the plastic bags tied up around the boat’s rudder, Anne Chick led the day’s events, and introduced the day’s speaker, Rob Holdway, Founder of Giraffe Innovation and presenter of Channel 4’s “Dumped” series. Rob took the opportunity to introduce his work, knowledge of the environmental crisis and the important role that designers have to influence change in our overly wasteful society. Rob described his ‘Dumped’ experiment which, earlier this year, took 11 unsuspecting eco-volunteers to an East Croydon landfill and challenged them to survive off other people’s waste. It is clear “a trip to the Amazon isn’t necessary to see the real effects of Climate Change”, Rob expressed.

The need to design out waste was paramount to Rob’s discussion. As designers we are very good at producing waste, but we are all very bad at using it, he explained. Rob expressed his thoughts on the role of education to teach designers to contextualise their work, and further highlighted the individual responsibility that we, as designers, have to be more aware of what our clients and their briefs are asking of us. In a consumer culture, the emphemerality of design needs to be transformed and celebrated, by only designing consumer products from biodegradable materials.

Explaining that 80% of UK waste derives from business, Rob picked up on the point that an emphasis on merely household waste is not nearly enough. The UK is the 3rd worst country in Europe at recycling and he questioned why we have 55 different collection methods in our country.

Petz Scholtus was there with us on the trip and has published her thoughts of the trip over on Treehugger.com. There are also plenty of photographs for you to see of our canal boat trip and the visit to Powerday on Flickr.

Comments

One Response to “The Need to ‘Design Out Waste’”

John
September 22nd, 2008 @ 8:17 am

Excellent work Rob. I have been chatting with Julia Hailes, she sent me the link to this site. Having done a speech last week for the Greengaged programme she thought I would be interested in what was going on, and I am…
I design products that reduce waste on construction sites, well I say that I have taken my first to market and am working on my second.
The Cross-Bone was designed to replace the timber profile system used on all UK construction sites. The current timber system is simply thrown away after a couple of uses. The Cross-Bone, made from recycled plastic can be used over and over again. Waste minimisation rather than waste reduction I guess, we should all be thinking more about incorporating waste minimisation/reduction into our lives I agree but if the product we bought in the first place helped you achieve that, well that can’t be bad can it.

Good luck and happy sailing.

p.s have a look at the web site http://www.cross-bone.co.uk and would welcome any comments