You know what they say, “One man’s trash… is
another man’s treasure”. This is a trait I have lived by my entire life.
Growing up, I was raised to not waste anything. Literally, anything. I feel
like that’s why I was such a chubby toddler growing up. I was told finish
everything on my plate, and so I did. Food was never to be wasted or thrown out
in the Keffer family. Food wasn’t the only thing either. I still have childhood
birthday cards, toys, blankets, McDonald’s trinkets, you name it, and I could
find some within my house. My parents always thought towards the future. They
would tell me, “You might want to save that toy for whenever you’re tired of
your new ones”, or they would say, “Don’t you want to save your dolls for your
children when you get older?” Some people would think they were kidding, but
they were rather serious.
As I was reading Cradle to Cradle by William
McDonough and Michael Braungart, chapter 4 was titled Waste Equals Food. This chapter goes into complete detail of our earth’s
components that go through a cycle of life, hopefully to be reused again for
the same purpose or for a greater purpose. I nearly laughed out loud when I
read one of the first lines that said “…there is no such thing as waste”
(McDonough and Braungart 2002). This entire chapter would have been praised by
my parents. They went into further discussion of how material flows can be
divided into two categories consisting of a technical mass and an industrial mass.
The goal for all products is to be easily decomposed and “consumed” by nature
once again. However, today several durable products are tossed into the dump.
Why, you ask? Simply because now a days, it is much easier to buy a new product,
rather than send in parts to be repaired or replaced. This has become the norm.
One
up and coming website that has been progressing the past year is Pinterest. This website has a section
called DIY crafts & projects. DIY stands for “do it yourself”. This
category consists of hundreds and hundreds of crafts you can make at home,
typically using several items around the house. Myself, as well as several of
my friends have each done several of these projects. On this project to the
left, I used older doilies around my house to make a gorgeous lantern for my
room. The process was easy, fun, and a great way to use material that had been
tossed in the closet for years. In a sense, this type of project could be
considered “up-cycling”. In Ann Thorpe’s book, The Designer’s Atlas of
Sustainability, she talks about unused materials that are recycled into a
high-quality material. Looking at this previous project of mine, I took
materials that no longer had a use in my house hold, put my crafting skills in
gear, and came up with a more glorified and useful product. Thorpe also talks
about the opposite of up-cycling, which is “down-cycling”. Sadly, this process
continues to degrade the materials that no long have use. “With each recycle,
the materials lose structure and concentration” (Thorpe 2007). That project is
one of the many DIY projects I have completed. After showing my mom this
website, we started a shelf of items specifically for DIY projects off of
pinterest. These items consist of cardboard rolls, food cans, plastic bottles,
plastic milk jugs, you name it, and it could be there. This activity could be
one way you could “up-cycle” with your family at home!
When I began looking online for other people who
had the same idea, I came across this YouTube video posted below. This girl,
Shelley, treats old clothes very similar to how I treat random materials within
my household. Her job is up-cycling clothing. She goes through several thrift
stores looking for quality clothing, and remakes outfits into something
fashionable. It may not be in style today, but she had the same up-cycling
concept a couple years ago. Wouldn’t it be great if we all learned how to reuse
items around our house in some sort of fashion? Taking the quality of the
product it already is, and warping it into a more useful product. Sounds like a
great way to not only have fun crafting, but also saving money for the future.
So what really is Cradle to Cradle, or in some
cases known as C2C? It really represents a model of the human industry on
nature’s process. It shows the lifecycle development of what takes place during
a materials life time in this world. How to do we keep this cycle going one
might ask? The answer was stated clearly in chapter 4 of Cradle to Cradle by
McDonough and Braungart. They stated, in order “to eliminate the concept of
waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems—from the very
beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist”. In the short run, it
could be very difficult to get this concept wrapped around everyone’s brain. But
when looking at it in a long run, if every single designer in this world
created their products with the idea that it was going to be reused someday,
the design process and production could be vastly different.
Some designers have already taken a bit of a leap
on that concept. LEED certified is the goal for almost every architecture,
interior designer, or engineer when it comes to creating a building. LEED
stands for the Leadership in Energy, and Environmental Design. This is the
standard for Green building design. In order to be LEED certified, designers go
through an extensive process of discovering ways to make their building the
most environmentally friendly for the area around it as well as the people that
work inside of it. A huge section is within the materials and resources. This
is an easy way to use several recycled products along with organic materials.
For more questions about lead, go to the link: www.usgbc.org
to find out more!
Hi, Hannah;
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for a fantastic blog! You really made this one very personal and story-like. I also appreciate that the direct quotes used have been used effectively to add power to your blog. I cannot wait to see how some of your peers respond. You obviously understand what you are learning. You pose here the million dollar question which is: how DO we keep that cycle going for nine lives? Virtually anything can be reused or recycled, but can it be reused in recycled in a way that gives it as much or more value is the C2C challenge. Nice job!
Dr. Armstrong,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment! I thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog. You ask a very good question that I think a lot of people are wondering, how do we keep the C2C cyle going? What I really think it boils down to the most is focusing on one section at a time instead of looking at the whole picture. Sometimes looking at the whole picture can get overwhelming. Instead why not focus on certain items like only cotton t-shirts? Plastic bottles, or paper and plastic sacks? Honing in on individual items could make it easier to get started on, and even learning the process for the next item you want to conquer or move on to. Take the Patagonia video for example. They only item they chose were plastic bottles to recyle down until it became the fabric consistency they needed. So why not do the same with other items too? Those are my thoughts, hope that makes sense!
Hannah, for one, I think it's really ironic that we both kind of found the same concept of "one man's trash is another man's treasure" after the reading this week but have very different blogs! I really appreciate your idea of how we have already incorporated upcycling in our daily lives without even really realizing what we were doing! (I love your lantern by the way!) I think the concept that "waste does not exist" is very interesting, because we both know that waste is EVERYWHERE in today's society but yet, if we play our cards right, essentially nothing is waste because it all has the potential to be reused, like your old dollies. So like you said, in order to keep the cycle going forever: every single designer must design things in the beginning with the intentions of that item being reused... which is a huge challenge! But I think the even bigger challenge is getting the idea into the consumers brain as well. How do you think we could go about that? The consumers would have to know that their product was planned to be reusable and NOT waste. Great blog!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments on my blog. I think you are absolutely right when it comes to changing the minds of not only the designers, but also the consumers. Which initially this could be rather tricky just because of that fact that there are WAY more consumers than their are designers. It could mean that they should focus on certain people groups one at a time until they can completely grasp the idea of reusing items, or up-cycling, and gaining a better knowledge of C2C. I'm not entirely sure how to plan that out, but it could be one way to start!
DeleteYes it definitely is! And there are WAY more consumers than designers, so once again it just all needs to be started as a trend. Changing the mindset of the entire population would be a very large task and such a strong movement and certainly wouldn't take place in a short time frame. But with the right endorsements and designers, I think all it would take would be very well designed sustainability pieces to get the idea seed and trend planted!
ReplyDeleteHello Ladies!
DeleteHannah, great post!! I loved seeing your personality and casual but professional language! As far as the conversation you and Jessica have engaged in I too agree that the biggest impact could be made through informative communication to consumers. I mentioned this in my comment to Jessica's blog in relevance to the harmful chemicals she discovered in research, but if products had a tag, much like food has the ingredients listed, informing consumers of what exactly is contained ini their products chemicals and all it may help consumers become aware of what is really going on in our world. Learning about the harmful chemicals used and seeing those chemicals listed on products would turn consumers off, I know it does me. Maybe this can be a start to an informative helpful change!
Oh! I love the tag idea!! I never even thought about that before. What a great wait to inform consumers. Because if you think about, I always check the tag to see if it's machine wash only, etc. before I buy a shirt, blanket, whatever. What a great idea of telling the consumers with a quick, brief, but informative detail about the product they're about to buy. I think you're on to something.
DeleteHannah,
ReplyDeleteI love the use of the analogy “One man’s trash…is another man’s treasure.” Like you I was raised this way, and was also a chubby toddler because of it! And, I even have some American Girl dolls saved in a box for my future children as well. I also, found McDonough and Braungart’s chapter Waste Equals Food interesting. I think, it is so weird as humans we do not act like the rest of nature; we dispose of thing rather than reusing them. Why do you think this has become the norm? I find it even wilder that we have landfills at all. Why can we not find ways of reusing these discarded items? Do you think there is a way we can become more like nature? DIY. This is one of my favorite topics, because I believe that restoring old items is one of the most creative things we as designers can do. Why is it always about the new rather than the old? I myself restored an old wooden dresser simply by giving it a coat of paint and using a staining technique, and it looks wonderful! You couldn’t even tell that it was old or that it wasn’t purchased from a furniture store. I am glad you purposed the DIY idea as a solution in your blog; I believe this could help keep so many items out of landfills and in a cycle of use and reuse! What do you think is the best way to incorporate C2C in our daily lives? Also, what standards of LEED do you think will help with this idea best? Great job on your blog this week! I look forward to next weeks!
Hayley,
DeleteI will have to come see the dresser you redid sometime, I bet it's very pretty! You ask several valuable questions that can somewhat be warped into a summary of answers. I think that very few people have literally "become nature" as you would say. It is difficult to see in areas like the U.S. but there are several countries around the world that do technically not waste anything. They use every item they have as something useful. Take for instance when I lived in India, a precious family that lived next door to me used water, a large rock, and some form of a scrubber she had made from the plants in our neighborhood to wash her children's clothes. I feel like you can't get more natural than that. However, some items are hard to see as reusable such as excess food from meats, rotten vegetables, etc. Even though some things are biodegradable, where are you going to keep them for the time being until they completely decompose? Tricky. I honestly think our world won't get a hold of the idea of sustainability until they see it as an absolute necessity. Before taking this class, I didn't even know there was a problem, I just new there were different options of fabric, food, etc. So with an issue like this, I am not sure how to expect our world to know that it is in fact, an issue. Does that make sense?
Hannah! I was blog browsing and when I read yours I was cracking up. Your story in the beginning was funny and so true! Making it personalized makes it all the more relatable! I loved how you included pinterest crafts into your post because I'd never thought of those as being a step towards sustainability! We will have to start doing more crafts off there! Keep up the good bloggings! :)
ReplyDeleteKATTT!!! Hi, remember that one time when we went to the mall the other day and saw that little detail about hand dryers in the bathroom?! I saw that you put it on your last blog and I wanted to like it! Way to put life statistics into reality! See you this week to work more on our final project!!
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