Date: 03-10-2019
Response to Allie Gullingsrud and Lewis Perkins’ “Designing for the Circular Economy: Cradle to Cradle Design®”
When William McDonough and Michael Braungart cam up with the idea of “Cradle to Cradle Design”, according to Gullingsrud and Perkins, “many designers thought of it as a turning point in their careers.” From that we could imagine how new and different the idea sounded back then. Basically, it’s all about circularity: everything in the environment falls into either the biological or technical metabolism. One of the three major principles that McDonough and Braungart put forward are very interesting: “Everything equals food.” Using the instance of a cherry tree, Gullingsrud and Perkins demonstrates how everything that’s considered worn out and useless could end up being useful something else.
As a student worker at IMA Equipment Room, I’m reminded of the situation of the little cardboard room that we have, opposite to Classroom 818. Ideally, it should work like this: students take apart their projects, from which they identify what could possibly be reused, and along with their unused materials, it’s all placed orderly in the cardboard room, waiting for somebody to recycle for their next project. But in reality, the room doesn’t work well. For a long time, it’s become a place where students left their unwanted stuff – all of it – they basically treat it as the “IMA landfill”. Because of that the room has been highly unorganized, consequently people having trouble finding what they need there. The room ends up a mess – new rubbish is put into the room every day, but hardly do people take things from it. (At the end of the day it’s we student workers that are cleaning it up :\)
I do believe McDonough and Braungart when they say “everything is food”, but if people actually want it to work that way, it’s a different story. There needs to be a regulated system, where waste are turned into new materials. Rules need to be made for people to know how to make their waste useful for the next person – because waste doesn’t magically become food, and there is a process. For example, a cardboard box could be recyclable, unless it is torn into all kinds of shapes of pieces and has sticky grossy tapes all over – that way, nobody wants to recycle it. That’s why students should tear down and throw away the tapes on it, cut off the parts that are unlikely to be reused, and then put it in the room. Besides, the room needs to be organized, things placed in order, so people know where to put one thing and where to get another.