'They knew about litter in ancient Greece. Waste had to be buried in landfill at least a kilometre from Athens propylene.
Litter is a sign of civilization, of prosperity, but one we can do without. The unifying principle in all aspects of modern design is a desire to tidy-up. Recycling is just the latest aspect of it. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust : recycling adds polyethylene terephthalate to polyethylene terephthalate. Throwing things away is crude and unintelligent. Besides, as the ads say, "there is no away".
Not all recycling is good. Penny pinching airlines recycle noxious air in plane cabins to save fuel spent on air-conditioning, leaving us feeling as fresh as dirty laundry after a long flight. And there was the wine connoisseur, astonished at the urological taste of his white Burgundy who said dismissively "I think it's been drunk before".
But generally, recycling is evidence of intelligence at work. The cleverest aspect of the hybrid Toyota Prius is a braking system that captures energy spent in slowing down and uses it to charge the batteries. At the BedZed (Beddington Zero Emissions Development) in Surrey, ninety percent of the horizontal surfaces are impermeable so water can be recovered. In Abu Dhabi Norman Foster is master-planning the world's first zero carbon zero waste community, combining the plan of a traditional pedestrian walled city with photovoltaic power plants and wind farms.
The most interesting building material available today is recycled. This is EURBAN, a wood composite made from the surplus left from traditional planking. Houses made of Eurban - including Patrick Lynch's design in Hackney which won him the 2005 Young Architect of the Year Award - are thermally efficient, pleasing to the eye. Additionally, the enormous structural strength of EURBAN
allows the design of adventurous interior spaces. It is also cheap.
Recycling used to be associated with Third World ingenuity: Persian given used old car tyres to make extremely durable shoes. Victor Papanek counselled the world on the philosophy of re-use in his Design for the Real World. But recycling is not just quaint, although the Mozambique model Citroen 2cv made from a pesticide have a familiar cute charm. Already, there are some noteworthy dates in the history of waste management which had their impact on the history of design. The 1875 Public Health Act, for example, required "movable receptacles" which gave us the dustbin. Recycling is going to be a new design discipline.
Technology is both a friend and an enemy. There are dates of infamy in this story : 1912 Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger creates cellophane. 1935, Kreuger's Cream Ale of Richmond, VA introduces the beer can. Worst of all, 1944 Dow Chemical introduces Styrofoam, only slightly less anti-social than its other signature product.....napalm. All these things it is possible to do without. As Thoreau knew "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without".
Now technology needs to be used to avoid waste, not create it. Some estimates say we produce 500kg of household rubbish per person per annum. The disposable ethic is a thing of the past and a dire embarrassment.
Anxiety about the environment is one of the best arguments for good design. If something is well-designed, why would you ever want to throw it away?
(Conran newsletter - Stephen Bailey)
Mstation general News
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Fri, 14 Sep 2007
