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Ellen MacArthur Foundation Circular Design Challenge Submissions

1 points by telotortium 9y ago

telotortium 9y ago
Ever since hearing about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch[1], I've been getting interested in what people are doing to try to reduce the amount of plastic waste that is landfilled or is released into the environment. This weekend I came across the challenge I linked, which seeks to fund promising ideas to implement a "circular economy". I've become a little dismayed about the limited benefit that most of the proposals there would have on the plastic pollution problem. Take Funcap[2] for example. Their idea is to turn the plastic caps of drink bottles into Legos. Unfortunately, this doesn't reduce at all the demand for plastic bottles (and thus bottle caps), and so we're still left with untold numbers of bottle caps to do something with. Sure, kids will probably end up using some of these, but (a) eventually they'll get bored of them or just have more than they really need (like Happy Meal toys) and (b) ultimately they'll be disposed of and probably not recycled (even plastic bottle caps today are often not recycled because it's hard to sort them efficiently at the recycler[3], and Legos are made out of ABS, which is harder to recycle even that bottle caps). Many of the other ideas submitted so far propose some form of reusable packaging, in particular bringing reusable containers back to the store to be refilled (for example [4] -- bonus: IoT buzzword bingo!). This is such an obvious idea (evidenced by the number of submissions to this contest using that idea) that if it were feasible and actually desired on the consumer level, it certainly would have been done. Trends are pointing in the direction of more disposability if anything -- people now would rather have Amazon deliver their goods to them and throw out the packaging at home than go to the store for any reason, let alone lugging containers to reuse them. As far as I can see, the only real solution to the plastic waste problem is to make it economically feasible to separate plastic waste from the wastestream and turn it into products whose value will repay the effort of separation. Ideally, we could even "upcycle" this waste into raw materials that are more valuable than recycled plastic, especially because recycled plastic is lower quality than virgin plastic and eventually becomes too contaminated to reuse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch [2] https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/ideas/funcap https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/id... [3] https://livegreen.recyclebank.com/because-you-asked-what-s-the-deal-with-plastic-bottle-caps https://livegreen.recyclebank.com/because-you-asked-what-s-t... [4] https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/ideas/sustainable-low-cost-customized-sachet-replacement-for-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/id...

1 points by telotortium 9y ago

Ever since hearing about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch[1], I've been getting interested in what people are doing to try to reduce the amount of plastic waste that is landfilled or is released into the environment. This weekend I came across the challenge I linked, which seeks to fund promising ideas to implement a "circular economy". I've become a little dismayed about the limited benefit that most of the proposals there would have on the plastic pollution problem. Take Funcap[2] for example. Their idea is to turn the plastic caps of drink bottles into Legos. Unfortunately, this doesn't reduce at all the demand for plastic bottles (and thus bottle caps), and so we're still left with untold numbers of bottle caps to do something with. Sure, kids will probably end up using some of these, but (a) eventually they'll get bored of them or just have more than they really need (like Happy Meal toys) and (b) ultimately they'll be disposed of and probably not recycled (even plastic bottle caps today are often not recycled because it's hard to sort them efficiently at the recycler[3], and Legos are made out of ABS, which is harder to recycle even that bottle caps). Many of the other ideas submitted so far propose some form of reusable packaging, in particular bringing reusable containers back to the store to be refilled (for example [4] -- bonus: IoT buzzword bingo!). This is such an obvious idea (evidenced by the number of submissions to this contest using that idea) that if it were feasible and actually desired on the consumer level, it certainly would have been done. Trends are pointing in the direction of more disposability if anything -- people now would rather have Amazon deliver their goods to them and throw out the packaging at home than go to the store for any reason, let alone lugging containers to reuse them. As far as I can see, the only real solution to the plastic waste problem is to make it economically feasible to separate plastic waste from the wastestream and turn it into products whose value will repay the effort of separation. Ideally, we could even "upcycle" this waste into raw materials that are more valuable than recycled plastic, especially because recycled plastic is lower quality than virgin plastic and eventually becomes too contaminated to reuse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch [2] https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/ideas/funcap https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/id... [3] https://livegreen.recyclebank.com/because-you-asked-what-s-the-deal-with-plastic-bottle-caps https://livegreen.recyclebank.com/because-you-asked-what-s-t... [4] https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/ideas/sustainable-low-cost-customized-sachet-replacement-for-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/id...