This essay explores how teaching youth to produce and sustain for themselves is the best possible starting point society can make into switching mentalities from a re-working culture, into a re-designed society that protects, preserves, and provides for our planet, and our communities. I will establish how the growing concern over material composition has pushed designers to establish solutions healthy for the Earth while highlighting the need for our global society to redesign the way we use materials instead of reworking the materials established as non-sustainable and environmentally poisonous. I will argue the importance of recycling as well as the simplicity of the action; and how teaching our children from a young age to care for the earth will install in them the knowledge of communal care, self-sustainability, and innovation.
Increasing concern has been shown by both consumers and designers alike in recent years about the material composition of the products that consumers themselves are buying, and the biodegradability of said materials. Eben Bayer (2015) and his team took the initiative, developing a biodegradable plastic that uses a mycelium based adhesive called MycoBond to grow agricultural waste into a non-toxic packaging plastic and insulation for housing, which, at the end of their life may be safely used as garden mulch or compost, providing any lacking nutrients or minerals that the earth may need to thrive. This is a cost-effective answer to a massive waste product we’ve created, as currently, polyethylene foam packaging, old insulation, used or broken plastic furniture and car bumpers are extremely hard to recycle, let alone their lack of bio-degradability. The fact that these products by Evocative biodegrade into the soil around them, supplementing any of the minerals that may be lacking, provides a perfect sanctuary for any plants the consumer wishes to grow. A haven right in your backyard. This planned lifetime of these products creates a connection for society to the Earth, where we are actually providing something that the Earth needs with things that we no longer require the use of, purely through consideration of materials and their effect on the environment, knowing where your materials are being supplied from, and planning how your product will be wasted. Architect William McDonough and chemist Dr. Michael Braungart (2015) founded the McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry in 1995 thinking exactly this, sparking the change in the way designers thought about their ideas on an environmental scale, with their company effectively providing a reliable methods for companies to establish solutions concerning material reapplication, material composition, and renewable material and energy consumption when developing their own products. Their integration of their ‘Cradle to Cradle design framework’ (2002) is helping companies globally to achieve environmental sustainability; to promote solutions revolving around composition, re-usability, and re-newability of materials, their effect on the environment and any communities it may affect. In short, planning out the life of the objects. These two companies have made it very easy and accessible for the general public to change the way they deal with their waste, and if society all starts getting involved now, due to the adaptive behaviours of humans as a species, society’s mind-set will develop as youth’s view our changed actions as normal, and think nothing of mimicking them (Karsten, 2005).
Highlighting to society the importance of recycling is the only way to get society to understand how living this ‘Cradle to Grave lifestyle’ is contaminating our planet. Clean paper and cardboard waste are simple and free for members of the community to recycle and ensure fewer trees are consumed needlessly. Glass, aluminium and steel are the most straightforward of our wastes to recycle, as they return the way that they were first produced, without the need for any new mineral additives (Recycle NZ). Paper4trees (2012) has begun a new program for schools around New Zealand, promoting recycling of paper and cardboard through their own in-house systems, and rewarding the students with native flora to plant around their schools, creating green, open, and fresh environments to enjoy being outside. Recycle NZ (n.d.) has also gotten involved and initiated several new movements: The first; getting schools and parents involved in teaching children about recycling. They have dedicated a section of their website to children involvement in recycling, providing sources for teachers, parents, or even the youth themselves for activities that get the children effectively committed to the care and protection of their environments. This directly corresponds with the Moana practices of Tā-Vā, the idea that to influence your choices in the present, you must look to the knowledge of the past in order to properly protect your future, hereby meaning that by teaching youth the knowledge we have of how to nourish and conserve our environment, they will ensure that their future generations thrive while the Earth provides for our global society, with the choices they make throughout their lives. The second; an educational mantra comprising of “The 6 R’s”, teaching children to both consider aspects of their behaviour themselves, and conduct their consuming behaviour in a less wasteful manner. This mantra consists of: Refusing what you don’t need; Reducing what you do need; Reuse anything that you can; Recycle the things you cannot refuse, reduce, or reuse; Rehoming what you no longer need or want; And rotting/Composting the rest (Recycle NZ n.d., Mahina 2010). Even plastics are no longer the horrendous issue they were previously. Michael Biddle’s MBA Polymers (2011) is changing the way that society views recycling plastic, creating a sustainable and valuable commodity with compelling monetary benefit. They use a 30-step system to extract imperfections like metal, shredding and sorting the plastic, producing them into pellets easily reused in the industry. This encourages ‘Cradle to Cradle’ thinking, not just from designers themselves, but from society as a whole. If the global society invested in this, there would be a massive reduction of greenhouse gas emittance, as these processes consume “less than 20% of the energy needed to produce virgin (plastics) from petrochemicals” (2011). Globally, we are using approximately 250 billion kg’s of plastic annually and recycling less than 10% of this. Society needs to realise that plastics are far more valuable than steel (cost per weight value) and should therefore be conserved. We don’t need to manufacture more plastic, we already have so much, and if it can all be recycled and reused cheaply, without needing extra chemicals or minerals, why not invest?
An easy way to keep Recycle NZ’s mantra movement going is to get the children involved in communal production. It teaches the children to respect and tend the earth, so they can provide for themselves and their loved ones (Mahina, 2010). Putting vegetable gardens in schools has brought extremely positive responses from everyone involved, with 95% of children, 86% of administrators, and 84% of family members getting involved with the program in the providing schools (National Gardening Association, (2011). This also addresses a popular concern of Berg, Spek, Huttenmoser, Davis, and Bjorklid (as cited in Karsten, 2005) for the health of children living in contemporary cities particularly focused on the lack of open green spaces and pollution in their social environments. The effect this has had on children’s space-time behavior has been dramatic, with children being unable to play outside, due to the dangers of traffic, the pollution, and ‘stranger danger’, driving them inside the home (Karsten, 2005). Of the estimated 1.6 million youth that National Gardening Association has reached, nutritional and environmental attitude levels among youth have risen dramatically (96% and 93% respectively), with community spirit, social skills, and self-confidence levels also rising considerably (91%, 86%, and 85%).This highlights the idea developed by Moana (indigenous) cultures that everything involving nature, the mind, and global society, are eternally exchanging relations, boosting both conflict and order. Conflict in the sense that we are a rapidly expanding species that argues and consumes, but order in the way we do learn and develop, often along similar lines until forced otherwise and we are a very routinely orientated species, repeating similar actions until unable. By this logic, once society has established environmental sustainability, we will continue to strive to be more environmentally friendly, to create items that give back to the Earth, mimicking natures ‘Cradle to Cradle’ life plan. Youth learn by example (Karsten, 2005), when they observe society acting a certain way they will mimic. It therefore stands to reason that if the youth of today see the rest of society following these easily implemented schemes providing for the planet, preserving and protecting their carefully cultivated plots, they will mimic us, and think nothing of it. This method of societal mind change would only take about two generations to be fully effective, which thank to the University of Oxford (2015), is about how long we have until the globe reaches 2° of human caused climate change.
Faced with the fact that the environmental, ecological, and socio-cultural crises are so interconnected, it has now become ‘normal’ to think that reworking an item so it is rendered less environmentally harmful is a great step in the right direction, but rather inadequate in the grand scheme of things, and the more time passes, the more evident it’s becoming, not just to leaders in our global communities, but also to the everyman (Manzini, 1994). During history, two decisive changes, at the very least, in globally communal perspective have become necessary. The first concerned the global acceptance of the shift where the question of the environment was switched from a minor issue, to be dealt with at a later date, and given significance in the agenda of all members of our global society. However, the shift that must take place today, is the acknowledgment by all members of society that the environmental crisis is part of the much larger phenomenon that we ourselves have created with the previously dominant industrial development model that is only recently getting a rehaul (Manzini, 1994). We are currently living in what has been dubbed ‘a Knowledge Society’, where creativity, ideas and information collaboration have formed the grounding for our current development/innovation model (Thomas, 2010). Open-source knowledge will likely be the basis for our newly refined model of development/innovation. The aim is not to propose solutions for every problem, it is to find a new perspective on the world, a new way of behaving. Our development model will emerge from dialogue and conflict among a multiplicity of ideas, visions, and proposals due to different societies looking solely into their own histories, without branching out into our shared global past to pilot our decisions in the present. “It will come into being thanks to a widespread atmosphere of innovation involving all social actors.”(Mahina 2010, Manzini 1994, Thomas 2010).
With the public consideration of materiality and recyclability of our habitually consumed goods growing in fashion, and children around the world getting involved in communal and school-based gardens; learning self-sufficiency and consideration of their actions, it is only a matter of time before a complete societal mind switch occurs, where we have redesigned the way we consume and produce, becoming a society that looks at all the mistakes that we have procured in our short history, and implements what society has learned from these events, to protect, preserve, and provide for our communities, our families, and our Earth.
References:
Biddle, M. (2011). MBA Polymers: Because sustainability matters. Retrieved from: http://www.mbapolymers.com/home/
Biddle, M. (2011). MBA Polymers: Because sustainability matters. Retrieved from: http://www.mbapolymers.com/home/our-company
Karsten, L. (2005). It all used to be better? Different generations on continuity
and change in urban children’s daily use of space, Children’s Geographies, 3:3, 275-290, DOI: 10.1080/14733280500352912 Mahina, H. O. (2010) Tā, Vā, and Moana: Temporality, spatiality, and Indigeneity. Pacific Studies, 33(2/3), 168-202.
Manzini, E. (1994). Design, Environment and Social Quality: From “Existenzminimun” to “Quality Maximum”. Design Issues, 10, 37-43. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511653/
Mayer, E., Deull, C., Kelson, R., McIntyre, G., Weinstein, J. (2015). About Evocative. Retrieved from: http://ecovativedesign.com/about/
McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2015). About MBDC. Retrieved from: http://www.mbdc.com/about-mbdc/overview/
McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2010). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York, NY: North Point Press.
National Gardening Association. (2011). About School Gardening. Retrieved from: http://www.kidsgardening.org/grants/about-school-gardening
Oxford e-Research Centre. (2015). TrillionthTonne.org: Explaining the Need to Limit our Cumulative Emissions of Carbon Dioxide. Retrieved from: http://www.trillionthtonne.org/
EERST Paper4trees. (2012). Paper4trees: Carbon Reduction Program. Retrieved from: http://www.paper4trees.co.nz/
Recycle NZ. (n.d.). Why Recycle? Retrieved from: http://www.recycle.co.nz/problemsize.php
Thomas. B. J. (2010). Development in Practice. Participation in the Knowledge Society: the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) Movement Compared with Participatory Development. 20(2), 270-276. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27806693
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