Designers!, often referred as sensitive species, are we sensitive to the issues around. We have numerous chemicals, heavy metals and materials around us. We are still brewing new sets of synthetic creations from our laboratories with no counterparts in nature. Where are we leading towards?
With so much green washing around, now that most us care for the environment. We try and buy things made of recyclable/recycled materials, but these things which add up to your sensitivity quotient to environment might not be designed with further use in mind, I mean recycling these products towards their end of life.Recycling and reshaping them would have cost us more energy and additives than it’s entire life cycle. It might release more harmful byproducts than it’s previous life cycle.
Forget the recycled products. Let us deal with certain aspects from our daily life.
Soaps and detergents, this one is the best example of man’s passion for simplifying things, Universal design. Single soap for the entire country, even though water qualities and needs differ from place to place. Imagine the strength of a detergent to strip off hard stains, to work efficiently in hard or saline or soft water, classic case of “designed for the worst case scenario”. What would happen when they are treated as sewage effluents, when they come in contact with aquatic lives in the rivers nearby?
Then our beloved PET bottles, the source of water for many of us in recent times is capable enough to leach out antimony into the contents stored in them. Are we aware of this, do we have a positive alternative to this?
Take out your wallet and see, how many plastic cards we carry around, we use at least one of them everyday, and we wear around some of them all day (ID cards). Does any of them have it’s material mentioned with, so sad, there are 90% chances that they were made of PVC.
And definitely your leather wallet, there are chances that they were tanned using hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen.
The computer which I use, made of brominated flame retardant chemicals, have heavy metals like cadmium, mercury and lead.Those compact discs made of Polycarbonate has bisphenol-A, which can mimic body hormones.
And the dust particle from the 3 in 1 printer/photocopier/scanner has nickel and cobalt. Imagine the kind of indoor air quality that will persist in this environment.No wonder 90% of world’s population has developed some kind of allergic sensation.
More over, we always go wrong when it comes to the debate of “Plastic or Paper”.
And our food and cooking; we might be ingesting genetically modified food products unintentionally and fluropolymers from our non-stick cook wares every day.
I need another hundred pages to explain why these things that I mentioned are not completely safe. I will try and address them in the forthcoming articles. And frankly! I am not trying to scare people away; many of these things have effective and positive alternatives too, but who cares?
Would be great if you could compile info on what happens to all the materials we throw away -- many are recycled, and many end up in the landfill. Also, for materials to be actually recycled, the presence of a system to get them to recycling units is necessary. This system is often the waste picker - scrap shop chain in large towns; in villages which produce much smaller quantities of potential recyclables the economics does not work out, and so no natural market system emerges. So perhaps, apart from the nature of materials, the societal, institutional/ economic systems are an equally important aspect of LCA and design. ~ Sanskriti
ReplyDeleteSanskriti,
ReplyDeleteAs you said appropriately, we don’t have a system in place even if Indian companies churn out 100% recyclable products. Often the core nature of materials in the products drives them to landfill/recycling units. Check the End of life-facts - sneak peak on “what happens to the materials we throw away”.
It is rather more alarming that these materials might be harming and humiliating our health on its way to landfill/recycler. Safe recycling, possibility of recycling that particular material/product are other question marks.
But these issues could have been avoided by right and responsible choice of materials.
We touch and use numerous materials whose where/what abouts are still unknown. (safety, health effects etc).
We need a closed loop system where materials, minerals, chemicals etc can’t bypass.
All these issues of sustainability should rather be addressed as a human habit than mere individual’s responsibility.
-Mohan vijay
It would be nice if rather than just list all the things we do which are bad for the environment, you offered some sort of solution or alternative or even went into some more detail that could help us get started to change these habits. For example, you talk about harmful soaps, but make no mention of what brands, or types of soap (scented, non-scented, liquid, bar, shampoo, facial scrubs, etc...) are harmful and which kind are not. What about detergents, any specific brands we should avoid? PET bottles - buy a brita filter? or what? And what is your suggestion for avoiding credit cards made of pvc or a leater wallet that may or may not have been tanned using Chromium4?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your interest and your blog, but I think it would be nice if you offered advice rather than just pointing out the obvious.