Sophie Thomas, Director of Circular Economy for the RSA looks back at the innovative Great Recovery stand at the Resource 2015 event in March 2015 which featured Fab Lab London and some of the work featured in the Great Recovery design residencies.

When I tell people that I am trying to promote the circular economy, I am often met with a blank stare. But when I explain the drivers for moving away from our current model (we have a finite amount of resources, increasing demand for those resources and an environment which is burdened by our current ‘take, make, throw away’ thinking), then they are pretty well understood. Everyone has experienced the frustration of having to chuck away a kettle because of a broken lid, or the guilt of throwing plastic into a waste bin. At the basic level, people get it: it is common sense to design products and systems so that they can be reused, recycled, leased or repaired and remanufactured.

But if the need to change from a linear view to a cyclical one is not hard to grasp, ask people to explain what this means in practice and we’re back to the blank faces. Hiding beneath the surface of this simple and beautiful concept is a tangle of mind-blowingly complexity.

So, to change our route, we need people to be engaged and empowered enough to really start to unpick, tackle and implement the changes needed. We need to prototype new types of products, but above all we need to communicate a systemic picture of the circular economy.

Engaging the Engine of Design

At the recent Resource show 2015, we created a stand reflecting circularity in action: from design, through manufacturing, to waste, with loops for redesign and repair.

Centre stage rolled the Circular Economy Train…nostalgic, engaging and fun; this enormous Brio set certainly drew the crowds. Players were tasked with manufacturing a household product by making real design decisions, about material type, business model and supply chain, at a series of ‘design junctions’ as their engine traversed the route. From first year students through to the entire sustainability team from Marks & Spencer, there was stiff competition to design the best way through the game, and prevent the little engines toppling straight into the landfill (a bucket at the end of the table!)

But it wasn’t simple. In making a product you are connected, by default, with much wider systems than may be represented by your own business plan. And so, in our game, you could make great choices of your own but still be knocked out of line by external forces: global competition for land and resources, fickle trends, costs of transportation. All these are challenges facing the designers of a new circular economy and were represented by our ‘tunnel of conflict’, ‘resource randomiser’ (spin to determine your fate) and a pack of action cards – just like Chance in Monopoly. The genius of the game was that it enabled us to show, at a glance, not only the complexity of circularity but also the deterministic nature of design in deciding the fate of products.

The rest of the stand was zoned to take you through the stages of a circular economy: Design, Making and Use or Waste.

We showcased designers whose work is already nudging us towards circular thinking: Rob Maslin from We All Design who is developing service design for a circular economy; Rich Gilbert from the Agency of Design who is working with clients on products for return and circularity; and the Restart Project who, as skilled repairers, are enabling us to extend the lifetimes of our everyday electronics.

In the manufacturing zone we hosted a pop-up makespace with our partners at Fab Lab London, complete with 3D printers and laser cutters, and demonstrating the potential for new technologies to help innovate and prototype new design practices. Fab Lab were also on hand to help us put repair into action, printing a replacement handle for a toaster and thus helping to extend its life. Along with Restart this represented the opportunity for not only experts but also citizens and communities to get involved in design.

The use and waste phase of the economy was represented by our recent Bulky Waste Design Residency with SITA, and highlighted the challenges and the potential in dealing with large household items and furniture at end of life. Our Kitchen Table hosted pop-up workshops with the design residents themselves, and also saw serendipitous meetings between mattress entrepreneurs, behaviour change students and business leaders.

Over the three days we played games, we shared stories, and we found fascinating and enlightening insights.

And the final destination for circular economy? Not the end of the track but, according to our game, circular enlightenment and product heaven! Most importantly, an alignment of economic, social and environmental objectives. And who wouldn’t want to get there?

With special thanks for PwC for sponsoring the prizes for the Circular Train game. Two delighted top scorers of the game each won a beautiful Elvis & Kresse bag, made from decomissioned fire hoses.

This year we will be showcasing the circular economy in action, with design booths (courtesy of The Restart Project, Agency of Design and We all Design), a making and manufacturing lab (hosted by our collaborators Fab Lab London), and a funky ‘used living room’ (think bedsit) space, where three designers from our SITA UK Bulky Waste Design Residency will be showing their work and leading discussions about problem furniture and system redesign.

So pop the 3-5th March in your diary now and come along to see closed loop design in action!

Daniel Charny curated the Fixhub for the Lodz Design Festival, Poland’s largest design event, in October 2014. Here he talks about the thinking behind the Fixhub as a prototype for a new type community makerspace for every neighbourhood

“The future needs a new relationship with making. A forward-thinking, backward-looking, sideways-stepping kind of making. A making born of the imaginative use of skills. Something like fixing.”

Our lives in the 21st century have been shaped by industrial revolutions and mass-production. And while quality of life has improved through democratised access of goods to millions, it has come at some heavy costs. One of which is that the abundance of low cost standardised products and their distribution is a massive strain on our environment. Another is that it is impacting on the identity of humans as makers. Most people, including professional designers are so distanced from the experiences of fabrication that we are loosing the knowledge of materials and making. Most people live with the limited choices of buying new or doing nothing. This ‘Brave New World’ needs fixing. Fixing in the sense of addressing the balance of knowledge and access.

The Fixhub prototype explores a vision in which more of us can repair and make things ourselves. It proposes a place where people can make fixing part of their day to day life. Building on new models of public-facing makerspaces like the Fablabs and repair cafes, the aim is to offer a low barrier access where people can build confidence in making through fixing and repair.

The Fixhub was developed in close collaboration with the emerging British Council Maker Library Network which actively promotes social creative collaborative studios where making, reading and showing work all take place in the same environment.Maker Library Fixhub offered daily courses on repair and design in the makespace. The Library displayed  specialist reference and inspiration books about making and repair. A special section, developed in collaboration with the RSA Great Recovery Materials Library was dedicated to materials that are setting particular repair challenges. Another section, developed with the Institute of Making showcased a selection of materials with unique properties such as self-healing concrete or strong adhesive qualities that will be used in the future. The gallery element presented a review of strategies and approaches to fixing. Ranging from practical solutions for repairing broken things to celebrating repair as new aesthetics. Exhibits included projects about accepting the broken by adaptive modified behaviour alongside inventions for reusing materials and rethinking distribution systems.

A special section of the exhibition engaged visitors with maker movements manifestos and invited them to join a debate speculating on what our world may be like if fixing became the norm or what if fixing was banned ?

A key reference to the project was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was the wider theme of the Lodz Design Festival for this year. The exhibition in the Fixhub was titled Brave Fixed World and incorporated the provocative Hypnopaedic slogans claiming that ‘The more stitches the less riches’ and that ‘Ending is better than mending’.

Whether you think of fixing as a utopian or a dystopian idea, as an essential opportunity or a sentimental backlash, it is part of our future. How much and in what way depends on how people, societies, organisations shape its environmental and cultural significance. Many minds need to be involved in making these plans and many more hands in enacting it. Design and designers could have a significant role in a much needed stewardship.

The Fixhub is joining the emerging Maker Library Network (MLN), developed by the British Council ConnectZA programme, to connect young creatives in South Africa and the UK.  The Lodz Design Festival Maker Library is the first pilot of the Fixhub model and aims to introduce and extend the MLN to new regions.

Partner of the exhibition: British Council

In October 2015, The Great Recovery gathered together a room full of experts in plastic, from a range of fields: recycling, design, science, engineering and sustainability.

A series of short lectures from members of this group revealed some fascinating insights, motivations, ideas, problems in plastic innovation and sustainability.

Over the two days, we heard from a spectrum of businesses, regional authorities and citizen groups who are tackling problems of waste in urban areas. Some of the most unexpected were also the most inspiring!

Goths rock out on waste

In Gothenburg, Sweden, Pal Martensson coordinates a waste ‘amusement park’ (his words) of 30,000 square metres which includes a restaurant, shops and community information centre. People bringing their rubbish to the tip are met by site workers who inform them that, in most case it’s not actually rubbish but valuable material, which can be sold in the shop or donated to local charities. Last year, the park held a ‘waste concert’ and an art exhibition, in which it auctioned off ‘rubbish’ paintings and raised money for local causes.

With a yearly turnover of £1.2m, not only is the park providing local jobs and contributing to the economy, it’s also changing the community’s attitude to its waste. By making waste disposal simple and fun, the city is generating new streams of social and economic value whilst also averting environmental damage.

One of the greatest joys, according to Martensson, is the delight shown on the faces of locals who discover that their old carpet, TV or fridge has a value and can be donated or sold for a good cause rather than joining the obsolescent hordes heading for landfill. This ‘feel good’ factor must not be underestimated, and Gothenburg demonstrates the importance of ingenuity and creative thinking in designing systems to deal with and divert waste streams.

Citizens, Smelting and Symbiosis

Another city pioneering new approaches to waste and resources is Amsterdam, with its 2014-18 ‘De Circulaire Metropool’ programme, and public-private partnerships spanning the harbour, water, energy and waste sectors that have started to lead the way on industrial symbiosis.

The seminal example of industrial symbiosis was given by a representative from Kalundborg, the 40-year-old Danish cluster of industries that evolved processes to share and benefit from each other’s waste streams. Not only do the companies share their wastes, but they also collaborate on funding for mutual innovation and test centres, and it is this system built on trust and communication between a diverse network of players – backed up of course by commercial agreements – that makes Kalundborg so special.

On the second day, we heard from the German VDI Centre of Resource Efficiency, which brings together the might of Germany’s main engineering association to provide resource efficiency tools and systems level processes for SMEs. We listened as Christian Hageluken, a director of Belgian firm Umicore which owns the largest smelter in the world, described the company’s journey from being merely a mining and smelting outfit to recovering 500,000 tonnes of precious metals from waste every year. He highlighted the need not only for innovation in technology, but also for new business models and stakeholder cooperation in ensuring a ‘systems approach’ to the logistics of materials processing.

Presentations from the Repair Café in the Netherlands and the Repair and Service Centre (R.U.S.Z.) in Vienna shone a light on the growing movement of citizen repairers who are raising awareness of planned obsolescence and enabling communities to realise new value from their broken appliances. Finally, Veronica Kuchinow, founder of ZICLA, told her remarkable story of revolutionising cycling in Barcelona through the design of the Zebra traffic separator from recycled waste.

A Messe ending

The Forum was rounded off by a visit to the vast Hannover Messe, where we saw examples of urban agriculture that combined office space with aquaponics. We were suitably impressed by the latest innovations in German industrial sewage systems, where gas from the sludge is used in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant to generate electricity and heat for nearby swimming pools and public buildings, as well as being processed into biogas and hydrogen to fuel vehicles.

When it comes to eliminating waste and pursuing a circular economy, the emphasis of the conference itself highlighted once again the need for new business and partnership models, and above all pointed to the critical stage of design as a catalyst for innovation.

We were thrilled by the reception we received at the Resource show last month. Having managed to bag ourselves a front-of-house space, an incredible number of visitors came by to tell us how much they loved the stand, how useful they found our colourful diagrams, and how much they were looking forward to the next phase of the project!

The network

Using low-tech colourful string and paper tags, we collected information about the sector each visitor worked in, the sectors they wanted to link up with in order to pursue more circular practices, and the major challenges they experienced in trying to implement a circular economy model within their own workplace. At the end of the three days, we had a pretty spider’s web of string (see pic) that demonstrated simply but effectively the new connections that people wanted to make. Interestingly perhaps, there weren’t any blindingly obvious trends, and it became very apparent that everyone was eager to connect with everyone else! If we had to pick out a few tendencies, however, it seemed that designers were keen to join up with materials experts, manufacturers and policymakers, and that manufacturers were more than a little enthusiastic about some investment. Resource managers wanted to be linked up with designers and materials experts (makes sense if they are to know what to do with all that waste), whilst the nest of twine around the left hand side of the wheel indicated that consumers, brands and manufacturers were all keen to cosy up with each other.

We have been busy recording all of this information so that we can create some really practical networking events, workshops and design residencies. Watch this space for circular economy speed dating and more!

The materials library

Also on The Great Recovery’s stand at Resource was our new materials library, which gathered together more than fifty different materials – all of which presented either a challenge or an opportunity (or both) for the circular economy.  Most of these had at one time or another been classified as ‘waste’, and came from industries as diverse as construction, fashion, furniture, chemicals and food. We even had discarded items from film sets, kindly donated by a company called dresd which ensures that these are reused, repurposed and end up in loving homes!

The library is being carefully stored until the opening of our permanent central London Hub space, where it will be on display for everyone attending our workshops and events. We will also be adding to it as we come across more materials that fit the circular economy ‘challenge/opportunity’ bill. If you have something you’d like to donate, please get in touch with lucy.c@greatrecovery.uk.org.

The Big Brainstorm

On the Tuesday afternoon, The Great Recovery ran a big brainstorm session based around three specific challenges: retail fit-outs, washing machines and fashion. Many stores are kitted out with interiors that would last more than 30 years, and yet are ripped out and replaced after only 3 – along with changing trends. According to research by WRAP, washing machines often fail to meet customers’ expectations for the product’s lifetime, whilst fashion, as we all know, is an industry of fast consumption, waste and obsolescence. We grouped the audience up to discuss these challenges and pitch their solutions back to the others.

In 20 years or so there will be less space for growing urban populations and their ‘stuff’, so perhaps washing machines will be obsolete anyway. How about if we just put our clothes away in a ‘cleaning cupboard’, which denatures smelly bacteria and leaves them fresh the next morning? Or what about a service model for washing, where you hand over dirty clothes to the local centre and tell them whether you’d like the clothes to be cleaned and returned – or whether you’d like some new clothes instead!

How would you fancy a ‘Chameleon shopping experience’? Rather than just warehousing a load of duplicate clothes that are time consuming to sort through, shops would be designed more like exhibition galleries, where you could view and try on a whole range of items before ordering at leisure. The debates around fashion were many and varied, with the evils of fast fashion being exonerated through new business models, and new materials being envisaged which could cycle at high value almost indefinitely.

The workshops

We also held two ‘tear-down’ workshops that engaged visitors with the challenges of electronics and textiles design by actually taking products apart. After mapping out the complex supply chains of some of the materials and chemicals included in shoes, clothes, kitchen appliances and mobile devices, we got our heads round the ludicrous journeys that some of these items take on their way to – and from – the customer.

And then we got our hands dirty!

It’s incredible how hard it is to get inside a rubber-soled shoe, or a phone, when the manufacturer has stuck everything together with industrial strength glue. In fact, it’s often not possible at all without cutting, breaking – or at least bending – a part of it. So, is this down to cold-blooded, intentional obsolescence on the part of the manufacturer, or is it just a blind focus on cost reduction at the expense of all other considerations? The answer is never straightforward; most likely it’s a mixture of both.

Participants were by turns amazed at the compound variety of materials contained in one product, horrified by the incredible amounts of labour and energy involved in getting them to the user, and shocked by the obvious lack of design for repairability and re-use. One shoe may include metal, wood, leather, card, PVC, textile and rubber – all held together by a healthy helping of impenetrable glue. One laptop may include over 100 chemical components sourced from more than ten different countries – and likewise stuck down with impermeable solvents.

Engaging people with the materials around them is often the first stage in getting them to reimagine products and services as part of a more circular economy. And it is this practical engagement, together with the process of redesign, that The Great Recovery will continue to pursue in its next phase of work.

The Great Recovery will be curating a special day of talks, workshops and events. More details coming soon!

For more information visit www.resource-event.com