Over the past two decades governments around the world have been experimenting with a new strategy for managing waste. By making producers responsible for their products when they become wastes, policy makers seek to significantly increase the recycling-and recyclability-of computers, packaging, automobiles, and household hazardous wastes such as batteries, used oil motor, and leftover paint-and save money in the process.
This strategy, known as extended producer responsibility (EPR), is the subject of a new special feature in Yale University’s Journal of Industrial Ecology. The special feature examines the use of EPR across diverse scales-from countries to provinces and states-and investigates work underway in the U.S., the European Union, Canada, China, Brazil and the State of Washington. The application of EPR to e-waste is a particular focus of the research in the special feature.
The Journal of Industrial Ecology is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal, owned by Yale University, published by Wiley-Blackwell and headquartered at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Articles in the special feature are freely downloadable for a limited time at: http://jie.yale.edu/EPR
A number of converted shipping containers are going to be offered as temporary accommodation for homeless people in Brighton, UK. Planning permission has been secured by the Brighton Housing Trust for five years to help ease the city’s housing need.
BBC News reports that the thirty six studio homes, which will be linked by walkways, are going to be installed in a former scrap metal yard.
More: Shipping Containers Repurposed To House The Homeless | Design on GOOD
Our archive of container-related projects is here.
The JF-Kit House by the Spanish design firm Elii is an experiment in “domestic fitness,” rendering “the image of a possible future where citizens produce part of their domestic energy requirements with their own physical activities.” Each room features a fancifully named exercise station that would, theoretically, help create energy to power the home would run on, including an “arm workout bureau,” a “spinning kitchen,” and a “triceps greenhouse.” A video shows the home’s imagined inhabitant lifting weights, cycling, and doing calisthenics as part of his house’s everyday upkeep and daily chores like cooking.
More here.
The stone cutting industry in Mahallat, Iran is a big business - in fact, it accounts for almost half the city’s economy. Unfortunately, the cutting process produces a lot of wasted stone that can’t be used. Tehran-based Architecture by Collective Terrain wanted to do make use of this “unusable” stone, so they built an apartment building out of the remains. Apartment No. 1 in downtown Mahallat is a contemporary stone building with eight 3-bedroom apartments set atop a street-level retail space.
Last week in my Design Observer guise I wrote about a project that I think will interest Unconsumption readers: Jill Stoll’s “Random Acts of Mail Art” (artisinalpostcards.tumblr.com):
Based in New Orleans, she described herself as “a disenchanted artist,” who loves the process of making more than the process of, say, hustling for gallery contacts. (She has, however, shown work in a variety of media at a variety of venues.) The postcard collages are partly a way of finding creative uses for materials that had accumulated in her studio — photos, magazines, various paper types, and “abandoned art projects” of past students. “Artists are hoarders,” she explains.
…
Surely this is a useful creative challenge for Stoll. But her quiet project is also a lovely example of what I’ve previously referred to as “dancing about ruins:” transforming undervalued, easily overlooked materials at hand — and here I would include not just her leftover magazines and the like, but the lately-unloved postal system, too — into something striking, special, memorable.
If you want to receive one of Stoll’s repurposed-material cards, or have someone else receive one, go here.
The rest of my D.O. piece is here: Jill Stoll combines artistic ritual, creative reuse, and the postal service as connector.: Observatory: Design Observer
Many of us have all but ditched physical media like CDs and records.But that doesn’t mean your physical media can’t be repurposed, as this creative San Francisco resident, captured by writer and editor (and Wired Angry Nerd) Chris Baker on Instagram, shows.
In addition to potentially revealing the owner’s musical tastes, it looks like the CDs also double as reflectors for added visibility.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/physical-media-photo/?cid=co7759134
Guitar designer and builder Jimmy DiResta has turned an AK-47 assault rifle into a completely functional guitar for rapper Wyclef Jean.
(via AK-47 Assault Rifle Turned Into a Functional Golden Guitar)
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our tour around Cape Town, Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo shows us the former industrial suburb of Woodstock, which the city’s design community has recently made its home, and explains the importance of upcycling in South African design.
“If you have 36 hours in Cape Town and time is at a premium, you have to head down to Woodstock,” says Naidoo. It is an area of Cape Town three kilometres from the city centre that has undergone an “extreme makeover” in recent years and is now home to an array of arts, craft, fashion and design studios and shops, as well as cafés and restaurants.
(via “South Africa has always had an upcycling culture” | Design Indaba)
Robert Kalinkin, a Lithuanian fashion designer, recently opened a pop-up shop that uses 24km (15 miles) of old cinema film. The film is woven together to create a tapestry of texture over the walls, ceilings and other elements on display—occasionally offering a backlit glimpse of the films’ contents.
![We’ve covered lots of repurposing and reuse projects involving speakers, but agree that “Hamburg’s Soundpauli company has [its] own quirky aesthetic.”
More here: More Repurposed Speakers: Soundpauli - Core77](http://24.media.tumblr.com/ca3fee11debb570a129a7aca0239f772/tumblr_mm701v4jnA1qzv12bo1_400.jpg)
We’ve covered lots of repurposing and reuse projects involving speakers, but agree that “Hamburg’s Soundpauli company has [its] own quirky aesthetic.”
How can furniture react to times of crisis? The decorational elements that were once appreciated, suddenly become superfluous and should evolve to reflect a new era ofausterity; the objects become edible and offer themselves to be consumed when needed.
In four conceptual objects, Lanzavecchia + Wai repropose basic nutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, sugar and chocolate as food reserves which at the same time complement and finish the objects by covering elemental metal structures.
A fun and provocative bit of decidedly unconsumption-esque design fiction:
AUSTERITY - Edible furniture for times of crisis (by Lanzavecchia + Wai)
![Students and staff at Newcastle University have created a pop-up cafe built entirely out of upcycled waste, including plastic drink bottles and cardboard boxes. The team spent three months designing and constructing the cross disciplinary project, which was contributed to by engineers, architects and social scientists.
The U-Cafe was designed to challenge our perception of waste and explore new ways of creating sustainable buildings. It features chairs made from plastic bottles, walls constructed using cardboard boxes, and staff aprons made out of recycled plastic bags.
Via: Pop-Up Cafe Built Entirely Out Of Garbage [Video] - PSFK](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7512d093b06a3f02dbff4a7f499267df/tumblr_mm4hz7taJg1qzv12bo1_400.jpg)
Students and staff at Newcastle University have created a pop-up cafe built entirely out of upcycled waste, including plastic drink bottles and cardboard boxes. The team spent three months designing and constructing the cross disciplinary project, which was contributed to by engineers, architects and social scientists.
The U-Cafe was designed to challenge our perception of waste and explore new ways of creating sustainable buildings. It features chairs made from plastic bottles, walls constructed using cardboard boxes, and staff aprons made out of recycled plastic bags.
Via: Pop-Up Cafe Built Entirely Out Of Garbage [Video] - PSFK
