Material wastage - What materials & why? - Monmouth case study - recycle, reuse - Oxfam - Gumtree - communal wardrobe - A Rubbish trip
When I was thinking of what to choose for my final major project, I had one topic in the back of my mind but wasn’t confident enough to discuss it with anyone. Initially, when my peers started discussing it with each other, I brought up this topic on how back home we (me and people in my family) reuse so many household items and use to its fullest extent before its discarded.
I was drawn to all the childhood memory of picking up cow dung for the bio-gas plant, how I used to burry onion peels and other food waste in the soil for making a compost/ or feed it to the cows, cutting up the succulent leaves to make a pretend phone out of it to play with, etc,.
Hometown Salem (India) - Buffalo and its feed. Black tank is the bio-gas plant (behind the house)
During a discussion in class an idea about sharing clothes by a group of people, the idea of having a communal wardrobe came up. This briefly shifted my focus on clothing.
I knew I wanted to do something in the lines of reuse and repurpose. Therefore, I sat down to see what could be addressed in these lines to form a research question. Everyday observation led me to the topic of food and beverage industry which uses “use and throw” or “use and recycle” for their packaging. And in a city filled with floating population and students the packaged food supply is magnified, and so is the wastage associated with it.
For my base research, I wanted to look at the organizations in London who have already taken the initiative towards this direction. Monmouth coffee shop had implemented their policy to only use reusable cups for the coffees at their shops. (Monmouth policy)
Overall conclusions: Overall I felt there was a lot a explanation to be done and not adequate understanding was observed among the customers. People who were regular customers understood the need for it and new ones were annoyed. People who are environmental conscious have a good idea about the system without having to visit the system.
Mugs and information displayed at the till for the ease of explaining to the customers.
I approach the manager to get more explanation on this. She explained about how the mug system works and what were the pros and cons (eg difficulty in cleaning a returned mug) of it. But since they where busy at the moment, I decided to get a contact from them to ask about the plastic cups. But never heard back from them.
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Mapping of the interior and exterior space
The ‘Rubbish Trip’ workshop by Rosie Oliver explored the past of London where the “waste” was recycled into the economy for survival during and after the world war. Her illustration references led me to the book London Labour and London poor vol 2 by Hendry Mayhew.
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