Daily Defies

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?

Sustainable footprint

It all started with the philosophical, perhaps a selfish question. What will I leave for my future generation? May be more money and assets than my father did, may be fame/name (good or bad), and may be what.
I don’t have many things under my control, do I? Still I will fight it out with life for the betterment of my future generation, and this is supposed to be a sustainable development? Satisfying my present needs without depriving the needs of future generation. This is what every other human being does! Everybody wants to leave a footprint in this world.

But what is that we are actually leaving for our children and grandchildren? We never really have to worry about these questions any more; we unconsciously are leaving enough footprints for them to witness our existence in this world, like what?
Warmed up earth, devastated natural resources, polluted atmosphere and huge stack of landfills. Will you call this sustainable development?

We humans have grown together massively like never before in last two centuries. We developed countries together, controlled/killed diseases together. We did everything for our own comfort, but at what cost? We’ve started facing the world of limits.

We have melted so much of glaciers that 40% of world’s drinking water source is going to be obsolete in another half century.
We have burned enough fossil fuels to witness carbon-dioxide levels never seen in last 650,000 years.
We used our mother nature’s forest, oil, mineral deposits, how many of us have planted a single sapling?
We have more than 80,000 chemicals in production and use today; only about 15,000 chemicals have been analyzed for its safety to environment and humankind.

This is just a sneak peek of the entire picture we’ve painted so far; this is what we are leaving for the generations to come. This is the footprint we are leaving in this world.