A very insightful and highly informative documentary entitled “Waste Equals Food” discusses how sustainability is going to be the minimum in the 21st century. Cutting down on waste or recycling products more frequently or even driving a hybrid car (which is not the best option) are all sustainable activities that our planet is thanking us for, but we need do to more according to this documentary.
The documentary discusses China extensively because of their excessive materials consumption and booming population. In China, 200 million houses are going to be built with bricks in rural areas in the coming 30 years. Using bricks will take 25% of the top layer of the agricultural land and half of the coal reserves of the country to actually make these bricks. This is a problem that is only going to be exacerbated by population growth and rapacious industrialists who are relentlessly extracting aggregate for industrial development. On an optimistic note, there is a lot that can be done in China to alleviate pressures on the natural environment and use their natural resources more efficiently. How? You may ask. Watch the film.
The documentary features two highly innovative and brilliant thinkers- Michael Braungart and William McDonough, a German chemist and American architect respectively. Both argue emphatically that materials are going through the industrial system and are not being returned to the biosphere, this is one of the biggest problems with design in general. Green design is the development of environmentally benign products and processes and a challenge to traditional design and manufacturing procedures. This design requires no non-renewable resources, minimal impact on the environment and has to relate people with the natural environment. There has been this push to Green design because of a general reaction to global environmental crises, the rapid growth of economic activity and human population, depletion of natural resources, damage to ecosystems and loss of biodiversity.
The film also explores the idea of the cradle to cradle (C2C) design approach. C2C is all about designing products that are first of all compostable, and secondly return rich nutrients and materials to the earth’s surface to continue life cycles. Further, with C2C, materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. Industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature's biological metabolism while also maintaining safe, productive technical metabolism for "the high-quality use and circulation of organic and synthetic materials".
It is a “holistic economic, industrial and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not just efficient but essentially waste free”. The model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design and manufacturing; it can be applied to many different aspects of human civilization such as urban environments, buildings, economics and social systems.
Both Braungart and McDonough advocate a phenomenon of Upcycling instead of Downcycling. Upcycling is the creation of a product with higher intrinsic value, manufactured from a material at the end of its service life, which had a lower initial end use value i.e. a purse made out of tin cans or candy wrappers. Whereas, Downcycling is the practice of recycling in such a way that much of its inherent value is lost i.e. recycling plastic in park benches.
Key Message: Green design is fascinating stuff. I encourage everyone to take 45 minutes and watch Waste Equals Food. Sooner or later everyone is going to be having a conversation about this and realize how momentous and relevant it is to our daily lives.
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