There is nothing more sobering than standing at the foot of a very steep mountain, particularly if that mountain is an enormous pile of waste electronics. At the bottom of the mountain stand a group of designers, chemists, entrepreneurs, manufacturers and technologists, all looking up in awe at the monstrous pile of objects. Coloured plastic […]
Tag: circular economy
A lot of my thinking work is around the concept of closed loop and circular economics. It sounds dry but it is actually a great challenge to design thinking.
In 2011 I joined a UK government mission to Holland to study the Dutch strategies to ‘design out landfill’. The Dutch introduced a ban on landfill in 1995 and are now pioneering new strategies in resource efficiency. Our visit took us to facilities that sorted, recovered, and managed resource (or waste as we were still […]
A small green shoot in an otherwise anxious economic time: In the small town of Baikal in Siberia a transformation takes place. Where once stood the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill belching foul-smelling sulphates into the air and chlorides, phenols and other chemicals into the lake now grows a blossoming tourism industry. The ecologists had […]
wasted talent 