Demand for Recyclables

Alright, there’s been a lot of talk going around the blogosphere lately about the recycling epidemic forming in the United States. Basically, if you haven’t already heard, the United States sends a majority of their recyclables over seas to China to be processed into new materials, however, because of the global economic crisis prices for recyclables have plummeted leaving the United States with a growing pile of trash. So yes, this is a problem, but seriously, don’t you think it’s an even bigger problem that we create so much waste we have to ship it overseas?


Maybe it's time we begin to look at our recyclables as a raw material rather than a waste product. Many designers from around the world have been creating beautiful products made from post consumer products. Take for instance the Campana Brothers or Piet Hein Eek, both creating beautiful furniture from reused materials and both happen to be outside of the United States. Perhaps it's time for US designers to start looking at these waste materials as a material to work with rather than ignore. The alternative craft movement in the US have been quick to use found materials as it is economically attractive due to the fact that waste is generally free. Also, the use of waste materials is an evironmentally sustainable idea, cutting down on the mining, processing, and shipping of raw materials.

Aside from the alternative craft movement, there have been a few grassroots movements to use our waste as a raw material and divert malterials from being barged overseas or dumped in a landfill. Tiny Texas House has been carefully deconstructing houses in their region and building new prefab houses out of the materials. For me this just makes sense, and apparently it is working from an economic perspective as well.


So what is really stopping these ideas sound really great, and seem to make so much sense, what is stopping them from really taking off? Well there are 2 real issues. First, economic feasibility, Tiny Texas Houses works however they are only producing a very small amount of homes a year and aimed at a particular market who are willing to pay a high price for sustainability. The production of houses is a very refined process and the mining and transporting of materials is rigorously efficient. Maticulously taking down houses and preserving the material is a much slower process and therefore costs more money. New processes and networks need to be put in place before these ideas can really take off. These can come in the form of online networks or informal networks. Ebay and Craigslist are 2 online networks that have done a great deal for reuse. Think about how many items have been listed on craigslist that would most likely have found the landfill 10 years ago? Informal networks can work too, for instance the scrap industry, where legitimate, (and sometimes illegitimate) scrappers pick up reusable materials and sell them to scrap yards for a small profit.


Second, a paradigm shift will have to occur in which the general public changes their opinion on the value of our recyclables. Big name designers don't fool around with used materials because they presume their consumers will not appreciate used materials over new ones. This is why reuse is still a niche market. It is important to note however, that reuse is gaining steam and many companies, such as Frietag, maker of recycled messenger bags, have made enormous strides in changing the perception of used materials. The best way to infiltrate popular opinion is to hit the authorities in consumer products. When Macy's, Bloomingdales and Barneys start selling reuse, soon to follow will be all the small retailers scattered across the nation. But in order for reused goods to get there, there needs to be a good amount of quality designs using these materials to choose from. Maybe we need a national design challenge or something.


(Photo from TreeHugger. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from DesignCrack. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from TinyTexasHouses. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from TreeHugger. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Dump

The recent New York magazine article on the former Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, delineating the plans and hopes for the site’s transformation into an immense park, kicks off with a false ending:

“Let’s start at the end of one story, the story of the dump, with the view from way up on top of it…”

Fresh Kills might not function as or look like a dump anymore, but that doesn’t mean the dump is gone, or that the 53 year-old, 3000 acre-wide “mistake” is finally on its way to being “corrected” (same thing with this month’s Metropolis Mag profile of the alleged future park).

At the risk of this sounding like shameless self-promotion, I want to point to a very different perspective on the whole reclamation affair presented by architect/geographer John May in a book I recently worked on. As others have already highlighted, May’s controversial take on Fresh Kills describes the trash heap as a materialization of a collective morality, a set of basic, unquestioned beliefs that sustain and make operative our everyday reality without us even noticing. May sees in Fresh Kills a frightful memento of an era based on the assumption that “freedom and accumulation are complimentary goals; the recognition that images are commodities; and an unquestioned embrace of a set of hopeful and reactive technological responses, designed to prevent massive accidents that have already happened.” He recognizes that Fresh Kills is tied to a particular development scheme, both in economic and cultural terms.


What counts for the dump, counts for the remediation and redesign of the site. May goes straight to the throat of the Fields Operation proposal for reclamation, despite all its good intentions and wishful 4-step "livingscape" program. All the capping and veiling and the sealing tight are carried out not only to elude dealing with material run-off of the waste, but also to distract from what that waste means and implies and reflects (the architects and the city want to avoid any leaks, physical or moral).

In the urbanism of Fresh Kills, before and after closure, a series of enormous corrective measures and technological “fixes” (along with minor changes in the official rhetoric) are supposed to heal and cleanse and erase the ugly from the site, leaving a landscape that can be consumed without guilt as the “wholly fantastical Photoshop collages of upper-middle clash recreational enjoyment” of the proposal demonstrate. One has a nagging sense of this whole idea of a place set back on the right track, and healing itself back to normal is something of a hoax, “a remarkably compelling lie, beautifully rendered, but a lie nonetheless.” Like people who promise to cure cancer with meditation or massages.

What is to be done then? How can we respond to these overwhelming objects we’ve spun into being and then lost grip on? Do we need to make things better, or do we need to learn from them, even if the learning process is ugly and painful? Is there any way we can do both? The same questions apply to all the vast environmental challenges we’re currently faced with, our cities included.