February 12, 2014
WE WANT YOUR RUBBISH!
As part of our stand at the Resource show, The Great Recovery will be creating a ‘materials library’ to display waste materials that present solutions – or create problems – for recycling, reuse and remanufacturing. The focus of our Phase 2 programme is on the interrelationships between design, materials and waste, and the library will comprise a focus for discussion about the challenges and opportunities of product redesign. After the show, the display will form the start of a more permanent materials library installation that will be housed at our new innovation hub in Central London.
Do you have a clever recycling process that turns 80% of waste into shiny new materials? If so, we’d love to know about it. But we’d also like to know about the remaining 20%: why can’t that be recycled or reused? Is it toxic or contaminated, perhaps? Or just not financially worth it?
More often than not it is the initial design of the product or material that leads to it being landfilled rather than re-used. In fact, often-quoted research tells us that 80% of a product’s environmental impacts are decided at the design stage. The Great Recovery focuses on this crucial aspect of design and works with designers and materials experts – as well as the manufacturing and waste industries – to tackle the problem of in-built waste.
If you work with or process waste materials, or create products from new materials, we would like to know! We’d like to showcase samples of successfully recovered materials as well as ‘problem’ wastes in our library, so that we can talk to designers and makers about why they need to start designing things differently. The samples can be gunky, bumpy, oozy, squishy, bitty, sticky or smooth!
We’d also like to know about your material’s story: where is it from? What is it made of? What happens at the end of its (first) life? How re-usable or recyclable is it? And what are the challenges you face in making it part of a more circular system?
Get in touch with us by emailing hilary.chittenden@rsa.org.uk.
Waste samples should be large enough for people to examine and handle (with or without a container!) so we are recommending a shoebox-sized amount. You can send your waste samples and stories to:
Hilary Chittenden, The Great Recovery, c/o Design Department, RSA, 8 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6EZ.
Don’t waste this opportunity to showcase your circular economy innovations. Send us your rubbish today!
