Since the discovery of the Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997, which is predicted to measure twice the size of Texas, five more have been found across the world’s oceans with the Atlantic gyre predicted to be even larger. This plastic takes thousands of years to degrade, remaining in the environment to be broken up into ever smaller fragments by ocean currents.
The gyre stretches from the coastlines of California to the shores of Japan. Recent studies have estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans. The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten.
Sea Chair is made entirely from plastic recovered from our oceans. The film uses a fishing boat and an open source design for the collection and creation of a marine plastic stool.
studioswine.com
Feb 16, 2013 | Categories: blog, Open source, re-use, Recycling, Sustainability | Comments Off
In the “Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He asserts:
“This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as merely obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.”
“ReFunct Media” is a series of multimedia installations that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.
Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.
Download DeFunct / ReFunct Publication (ISBN: 978-0-9570777-1-3) ↓
ReFunct Media #5
[Pictures by Phillp Stearns)
ReFunct Media #5
[Work in progress]
Feb 11, 2013 | Categories: Art, blog, Hacking, Obsolescence, Planned Obsolescence, re-use, Recycling | Comments Off
ReFunct Media v3.0 is a collaborative project created with Karl Klomp, Tom Vergruggen and Gijs Gieskes during IN FAMOUS CAROUSEL#7, 2011 at La Gaite Lyrique. This project is based on theversion 1.0 created in 2010 and version 2.0 created in 2011.
In the “Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He asserts:
“This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as merely obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.”
“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.
Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.
Download DeFunct / ReFunct Publication (ISBN: 978-0-9570777-1-3) ↓
Pictures © 2011 vinciane verguethen
Nov 17, 2011 | Categories: Art, blog, concept, Hacking, Planned Obsolescence, re-use, Recycling | Comments Off
Curtis Palmer/CC BY 1.0
BusinessGreen reports that UK startup WEEE Systems has ambitious plans for addressing the e-waste problem and moving the electronics industry toward a closed-loop system. It plans to involve at least one manufacturer in developing a prototype plant that ultimately would see manufacturers taking responsibility for the full life-cycle of their products by helping companies reuse and recycle more, and more efficiently.
BusinessGreen quotes Bob Clarke, WEEE Systems chief executive, who explains the basic idea behind the company:
“The e-waste industry is bizarre in that firms currently pay you less than the old kit is worth to take it away and recycle it, but then if anything goes wrong and it does end up in an illegal scrap yard in the developing world you are the one that gets in trouble. We want to work with a manufacturer where they agree to give us 50,000 old TVs; for example, we’ll reuse or recycle them as appropriate and provide our partner with the resulting reusable parts and materials.”
The company is not to be confused with the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive in Europe, which introduced regulations for the electronics industry several years ago.
WEEE Systems says it’s trying to help the industry look beyond the minimum legal requirements:
WEEE Systems believes that leading businesses will want to look beyond legislative compliance and embrace changes today in order to realise the tangible benefits available – including releasing the real estate tied up storing surplus equipment, protecting brand value and meeting corporate social responsibility objectives.
With raw material prices increasing, there is a growing demand for the value that can be obtained from re-used and recycled materials, further incentivising progressive businesses to take advantage of the material transformation opportunities available.
The BusinessGreen story says the company recently launched a new software package and service to do just that:
Dubbed Cosvcon – an amalgam of cost versus contribution – the new software and service package audits a corporation’s IT infrastructure, recording information on a wide range of metrics, including the equipment’s age, energy use, utilisation and carbon footprint.
The company then provides clients with regular updates on the status of their infrastructure and identifies the optimum time to retire old servers, PCs, phones and other equipment.
“The aim is to help the client realise the maximum transformative value of their IT, where we can say, ‘At this point the asset is perfect for the secondary market, but if you leave it for a year it will be good for the recycling market’,” Clarke explained.
Nov 17, 2011 | Categories: blog, e-waste recycling, Facts about e-waste, Obsolescence, Planned Obsolescence, re-use, Recycling | Comments Off
Original Article available here
In a hidden corner of Hua Qiang Bei there are two large buildings that are primarily dedicated to cellphones. These, however, aren’t the same as the cellphone malls found in the district’s main street. Here cellphones are traded as a commodity or even as a raw material. Hundreds of small companies work with (and against) each other to squeeze every bit of value out of yesterday’s mobile phones.
Due to the vendors’ reluctance to give up ‘business secrets’, it’s hard to get many of my questions answered or to trace the exact source of the devices that are brought here. Some outdoor vendors have so few phones that it looks like they personally collected them from the trash to sell them in the adjacent street market.
Within one of the main buildings there is a large room dedicated to stalls selling these pre-owned phones. Each stall presents a couple of hundred of them. I often see them bundled together in threes or fours, though not always by type. Most of these phones look like they would still function but there are quite a few with cracked screens or other obvious damage. Apparently, they still hold value for whomever buys them. One entrepreneur I talked to, told me he bought his phones in bulk from a wholesaler who got them from garbage sorters in Hong Kong and other major cities in Asia.
I was most intrigued by the building dedicated to the down- and up- cycling of these phones. Outside, I see a guy sorting through big bags of phone circuit boards. I’m not sure but I think he might be picking out the ones with particular chipsets that are in demand right now.
At some, point the plastic shells have already been removed to be recycled in another process. There isn’t much money to be made there, but the low price of Chinese labor makes it worth someone’s time to separate the last bits of metal from the plastic.
Next, the boards are put under a heat gun to loosen the solder on the SMC’s (Surface Mounted Components). Then the components are picked off one by one with a set of tweezers and pre-sorted.
The components are often sold to another company in the building that specializes in the next step of the process.
Next, the solder is removed and the components are cleaned and sorted further. For many of the shops, this seems to be the main activity. With some exceptions, this work seems to be predominantly done by teenage girls and young women.
Some of the parts are so small that they can only be handled with tweezers.
Behold the precious jewels of our information society!
Although the components that are sold here don’t have the best reputation, there are a number of quality control methods used to make sure everything is still in working order. One of them is an optical check for any obvious damage.
More interesting are test setups that use rewired versions of the devices that the chips original came from.
These boxes are made-to-order for specific phones and specific parts. The shop that sells them is one of several tool suppliers in the building. There are others selling soldering irons, heat guns and books with circuit board schematics.
Finally the most valuable chips get reprogrammed or flashed and packaged into trays and tape reels (I’ve seen them do it!) that can be fed into the pick-and-place robots used to build new devices.
The next post will be dedicated to the other activities in this building, such as the (partial) fabrication of Shanzai phones.
May 08, 2011 | Categories: blog, e-waste recycling, Facts about e-waste, Hacking, Obsolescence, re-use, Recycling | Comments Off
The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets — anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.
Junkyard Jumbotron from chris csik on Vimeo.
Mar 15, 2011 | Categories: concept, e-waste recycling, Hacking, hardware, Obsolescence, re-use, Recycling | Comments Off
Magnificent Revolution (MR) is a not-for-profit education project based in London. Made up of artists, musicians, designers, ecologists, and engineers, MR has flourished into a cross-disciplinary organisation working in education, ecology, engineering, design, art, music and film.
www.magnificentrevolution.org
Jan 31, 2011 | Categories: blog, Hacking, NGO, Open source, re-use, Recycling, Sustainability | Comments Off
By kevflanagan
I was recently asked by a friend to put together a reading list on sustainability. I put a bit of time into it so I thought I might as well share it here too.
Jan 30, 2011 | Categories: blog, Documentary, Recycling, theory | Comments Off
In the chaos of Mumbai’s best-known slum, thousands of recyclers process the megacity’s garbage and provide an invaluable environmental service, but the health and social costs are high. Today, many organizations are working to improve the working conditions of India’s valuable waste-pickers…
by Anna da Costa
“It’s funny how we popularise our movie stars,” said Vinod Shetty, director of the Acorn Foundation, when we met in his crowded office in Mumbai. “There are so many other people we should popularise for the work that they do, but instead, they are invisible and expendable.” This experienced advocate was referring to the work of the thousands of recyclers who reside in the city’s largest slum, Dharavi, and whose rights he spends much of his time promoting.
Although the BAFTA [and Academy] award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire did a lot to highlight the plight of Mumbai’s slum-dwellers, Shetty believes it overlooked a story of true heroism in this infamous quarter; one that forms part of the day-to-day reality for its residents, and for millions of others across India.
Dharavi, which has more than 1.2 million inhabitants, stretches across a 175-hectare area of prime real estate in central Mumbai. Thousands of corrugated iron huts are crammed side by side amid open sewers and muddy walkways. Electricity is sporadic and safe drinking water – in fact any water – is scarce. Yet despite these hugely challenging conditions, Dharavi houses one of the largest recycling industries in India. An estimated 20% of its inhabitants work on different aspects of waste processing, and the slum itself has an annual turnover of more than US$650 million (4.4 billion yuan).
Descend the rickety steps at Sana Birla Compound Pipeline, where a giant steely pipe taking water into Mumbai passes through the slum like an artery, and you soon see the evidence. Along narrow paths, within murky huts and beneath grimy warehouse roofs, piles of the city’s waste rise high. Used electronics and tangled wires sprawl like spewing intestines amid ageing fridges, stacks of flattened cardboard and piles of sorted plastic.
But watch for a moment and you notice order in the chaos. Men, women and children work from morning to night, sorting, assembling, breaking up and reassembling these elements of municipal waste in an endless, informal supply chain. According to the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority, Mumbai residents generate 11,209 tonnes of waste a day, and the vast majority comes to Dharavi, where it is sorted and processed. On average, each waste-picker sorts through 8.5 tonnes of rubbish each day.
The water pipe that runs through Sana Birla Compound
The recycling process in India is like a complex ecosystem, powered largely by informal labour. There are “waste-pickers”, who hand-sort and sell waste from homes, landfills and street containers; there are “waste-buyers”, who act as middlemen, purchasing recyclable goods from waste-pickers; and there are “retailers”, “stockists”, “recyclers” and many more in between. Millions of people across the country – an estimated 1% of urban populations alone – earn a livelihood by reclaiming reusable and recyclable materials from waste. “Not only does recycling provide nearly 25 times more jobs than landfill or incineration, it also offers far greater economic, social and environmental benefits,” said Laxmi Narayan, general secretary of waste-picker trade unionKagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP).
Through recycling and wet-waste composting, municipalities save money thanks to lower volumes of waste going to landfill. In Pune, India’s eighth-largest city, informal recycling is estimated to reduce garbage-handling costs by at least 25%, saving around 120 million rupees (around US$2.5 million) a year. In addition, roads and public spaces are kept clean and secondary products, such as roofing material, paper and plastics are created from the recycled materials. Recycling and composting also reduces the pressure on ecosystems and leads to a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. A recent study found that, in Delhi alone, the services of the informal-recycling sector are equivalent to removing around 175,000 passenger-vehicles from the roads each year.
Recycling is not only a green job, but also a highly skilled one. In Dharavi, I met Peer Mohammad, one of the local recyclers. He was sitting amid white sacks of plastic waste, sorting piles of rubbish, piece by piece. Mohammad explained to me how each type of plastic carries a different value, from as little as 5 rupees (US$0.11) per kilogram to as much as 60 rupees (US$1.29) per kilogram. By hitting each item on a rock and testing its flexibility, his expert hands can differentiate between more than 50 types of plastic. Sitting on an upturned computer monitor case, I watched him work efficiently through the endless piles stretched behind him, flies buzzing around us in the exhausting afternoon heat.
“These sorters are experts,” said Shaikh Mobin, a recycler from Mumbai who purchases plastic materials from workers like Mohammad and converts them into granules to make products ranging from plastic sheets to suitcase handles and irrigation pipes. “Learning to differentiate between these waste streams takes at least two years of intensive training. No institute in the world can train you in these skills. It’s not a joke. A lab would have to test these plastics to tell the difference between them if these guys were not doing the job.”
Making green jobs decent jobs
As “green jobs” gain increasing attention, not just from environmentalists, but also trade unions, government and business, an emphasis on ensuring they are also “decent jobs” is advancing too. Nowhere is the need to align these two objectives more obvious than in India’s waste-picking communities.“We must remember that India’s high rates of recycling accrue in large part due to abject poverty,” said Narayan. “[This] forces people to eke an existence out of collecting, segregating and selling waste…not necessarily our environmental concerns.”
In most Indian cities, recyclers receive no formal recognition from the municipal authorities. “They are largely anonymous, have no social security and no identity,” explained Narayan. Their work also exposes them to diseases as well as hazardous waste, which they generally do not handle safely, creating dangers for both themselves and those in the vicinity.
Peer Mohammed sorting through plastic
Waste-pickers earn an estimated average of around US$1 (6.8 yuan) per day and are often forced to do their work by night and out of sight. “Instead of being recognised, they are marginalised. They are nobodies. It’s our mess they are clearing, they live in filth and they do what they do at our service,” said Shetty. “If they stopped doing what they do, the city would be swimming in filth.”
According to one study, unsafe exposure to garbage can reduce the life expectancy of waste-pickers in developing countries by more than 40%. Shetty wants to see the government support training of waste-pickers on how to handle hazardous waste and recycle safely: “Workers need basic tools and protective clothing, such as gloves. There is a great need for space or zones to be created for this sector to do their sorting in safety and dignity.”
Parashar Baruah, producer of the award-winning film Waste believes the foundation for improving these working conditions is respect: “Waste-pickers and recyclers need to be given the acknowledgment that they are doing a crucial job for society…not only in the way we recognise and compensate them, but in the way we treat them and segregate our waste, starting with separating our wet and dry waste as we dispose of it.”
The Acorn Foundation and KKPKP are leading the fight to achieve this. Through the Dharavi Project, the Acorn Foundation is providing more than 350 waste-pickers with identity cards – a crucial step towards recognition and respect, which, in certain cases, also provides access to public or private schemes and grants – plus training in waste-management and safety. And thanks to KKPKP, registered waste-pickers are now provided with both life and health insurance and access to loans for education and other needs at reasonable interest rates.
“There are now 35 organisations working with waste-pickers in India,” said Narayan, who believes these efforts are enhancing public and political awareness of the needs and opportunities of this sector. A recent directive from India’s Ministry of Urban Development calling for the recognition and integration of waste-pickers testifies to this, though, cautioned Narayan, it is ultimately up to local governments to ensure there is compliance.
A separate – and growing – pool of organisations, including Conserve India, Thunk, Green the Gap, Haathi Chaap and Darpana, is also working to produce high-end products from waste to sell both domestically and abroad. Others, such as Daily Dump, are promoting home composting and segregation of waste at disposal.
And it isn’t just small-scale, local outfits focusing on the sector. Waste management is gaining recognition as a major economic driver in India and internationally. One recent analysis by consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan found that the Indian waste-management services market was worth close to 10 billion rupees (US$216 million) in 2009 and predicted it would grow to 27 billion rupees (US$582 million) by 2013. VC Circle, an investment news forum, has reported that water treatment and waste recycling raised US$216 million in 12 deals from venture capital and private equity firms in 2009 alone. Business intelligence provider Cleantech Group has also touted the sector as a potential growth area.
Venture capital firms are seeing this start to play out, according to Kartik Desai, vice president of Lok Capital, a New Delhi-based social investment firm. “There are good reasons why the investment case for waste management is so strong. It is a very large, badly served market because of historic underinvestment and poor delivery of basic services, especially to the poor. A variety of new business models have been developed over the last few years by an increasing number of entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries.” Examples of these in India include EcoWise, WasteVentures and Ecoreco.
Mainstream investment funds are also alert to the opportunities. Anand Prakash, managing director for south-east Asia at private equity fund manager FE Clean Energy, told VC Circle: “I see companies like waste management in the US emerging in India. Multibillion dollar companies that are going to take waste management on private contract in the same way as distribution companies have…so we are very much on the lookout for companies that have that vision and are positioning themselves right now.”
This trend is not unique to India. Around the world, the waste sector is gaining attention as waste volumes rise, burial costs increase, environmental and social impacts become clearer and concern over natural-resource limits intensifies. Terracycle, an organisation founded in the United States and now with offices in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada and Mexico, has created a waste-management model similar to that found in India. It recruits and pays “collection brigades” to gather and sell back specific waste products, which are turned into new consumer goods.
Unlike many countries, especially in the developed world, India already has a skilled recycling and sorting workforce in place. “India’s recycling industry has the expertise and capacity to scale massively, but it needs to be properly valued, formalised and supported,” said Shetty as we sat in his Mumbai office. There are signs of change, “But these need to be magnified.”
I looked down at Shetty’s desk where a series of small ID cards were carefully laid out, identifying recyclers as members of the “Dharavi project”. An image of a young boy, who could not have been more than nine years old, gazed back at me, accompanied by a name in bold type: “Sameer”. For Sameer, this card is the difference between invisibility and visibility, anonymity and belonging. For India, it is a step on the long road to tackling the enormous waste challenge, and creating dignified, green jobs.
This post originally appeared on Chinadialogue.
Aug 26, 2010 | Categories: blog, Recycling, Sustainability | Comments Off
