Week 11: Digital Tools Response + Final Plan

Reading Response

I have learned about the industrial revolution everywhere since a very young age – It leads human beings to walk into a brand new era, it increased people’s standards of living and the development speed boomed. I know that London is called the foggy city is because of the serious pollution once brought by the industrial revolution. However, I have never thought that the negative industrial revolution brought can last so long and rooted so deep. According to William McDonough & Michael Braungart, “industrialists wanted to make products as efficiently as possible and to get the greatest volume of goods to the largest number of people” (21). This kind of thinking leads to two results, while the first one is those technical developments centered on increasing “power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, speed”, and the second one is that “Neither the health of natural systems, nor an awareness of their delicacy, complexity, and interconnectedness, have been part of the industrial design agenda” (26). The complete and utter design error leads to our terrible environment today. The cradle-to-grave model impressed me deeply since I am one of the masses who contribute to this. I am used to buying clothes from shops like H&M, where the clothes can usually be worn for one season, and next year it will be out of fashion then never get worn or be thrown away. I also often buy something online which is useless and meaningless – I just buy them for fun, they may even be crude products. After I throw them into the trash bin, they just disappear, as McDonough and Braungart have said, “Away” does not really exist, “Away” has gone away. Maybe they have already become a piece of microplastic floating in the ocean as Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic has pointed out. 

To solve the problem, Cradle to Cradle suggests us to take action right now so we won’t keep harming our environment and future generations. “You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and implement a strategy of change” (44). In Accumulation, the authors provide us with a few feasible ways and examples of people reusing plastic/ using new materials instead of normal plastic. “For example, the amassing of plastics in seas and oceans has given rise to new ways of working through plastics, such as EU pay fishermen in the Mediterranean to catch plastic, rather than fish” (208). Yet plastics are accumulating in many different ways, as they break down, enter food chains as plasticizers and generate alterations in the eating patterns of diverse organisms. 

Therefore, along with government regulations, there are also other people putting the effort into figuring out the best way to reduce plastic pollution. In my perspective, one of the biggest problems of human beings is that most of us have thought of Anthropocene: we don’t consider what will be brought to the environment when producing, and Marx excluded the non-human from his definition of human labor (215). However, now most proposals on solving the plastic problems focus on non-human labor. 

 

Rather than having crude oil as their primary substrate, biodegradable plastics are usually made from starch and cellulose – what otherwise is referred to as ‘renewable’ materials. Since these materials are derived from plants, and maybe composted or degraded through anaerobic digestion rather than put into landfill, they are seen as a possible way to address the accumulation of plastics in environments (Song et al. 2009: 2127).  

 

Same as what we do in class, this article raises the idea of making biodegradable plastic by using natural things (e.g. starch). What’s more, Murakami and Kieren Jones, develop their project as a response to the increasing amounts of plastic found in the seas and at the littoral margins. The project participants have developed a ‘nurdler’ device, a ‘sluice-like contraption’ for collecting and sorting plastic debris and microplastic pellets from the ocean, just like what we do in class (220). However, this might lead to danger. We have bacteria when creating bioplastic from tea and sugar, and they are killed because of vinegar, what if those bacteria evolves? In Accumulation, they tell a story of bacterial run amok in London, causing the whole city degrading. But so far everything about bioplastic seems to be under control – at least these material residues also provide fodder for rethinking the trajectory of our material politics, outside the closed loop of renewed capital, to a more extensive understanding of and speculative approach to the complex and collective carbon work that emerges from our lived plastic materialities (224). 

 

Final Plan

 

So according to this map that I drew my plan will mainly be the following steps…

1. Collecting – A4 paper, posters, other paper-related materials
2. Making – use the materials I have collected to remake new papers （and when blending them, the time will decide how it looks, and if there remain any patterns or not)
3. Application – different applications, including souvenirs, notebooks, printing paper, and some planning application: usable materials (e.g. for laser cut), waimai box, reusable flower pot…

Following these 3 steps, I will test my hypothesis:

 By remaking paper, it will gradually build a circle of paper using inside the school, as well as contributing to other areas that can use remade materials. 

A list of items/machines I need:

1. paperssssssss
2. blender
3. mold (I think I am going to use laser cut or the digital fabrication machine) 
   

   Digital Fabrication Machine will be a good choice for me to make the mold

    

4. heater/dryer/iron
5. sponse&bath towel&huge paper towel (maybe the kind we use in the toilet)
6. windowscreen
7. cooking spray

 

Why I include a waimai box in my project applications is that when I ordered a salad waimai, the container they use is special. It is soft, proteiform, and not water-proof. I examined it and found it pretty interesting, but with the time goes the sauce in salad almost soaked through the box. There is a recyclable sign at the cover of the box, but personally speaking, I don’t think the dirty box can be recycled again – it is also difficult to be cleaned. This box provides me with some inspiration, but I don’t feel like it is truly a successful example.