This is due to the fact that our waste and byproducts are hidden, transported, swept under the rug and away from the public eye. However the problem is not so much ours as it is a problem with the Government. The Government of the United States orchestrated consumerism after World War II to revitalize the economy after the war(8). The productive economy demands that consumerism should be a way of life, that we take the act of buying, using, throwing out—a ritual of life that seeks ego satisfaction in consumption where things could be discarded and replaced. The market design things, cars, buildings, products that will last for a finite amount of time, things are not built to last as they used to so that consumers would be forced to upgrade and replace. It is an endless cycle of disposing, buying, working off debt only to dispose and buy again. Business and capitalism has no pity for the environment, it is there to make profit, to take from us for their own benefit.
It is human egoism that drives our will to consume and the systems that encourages it, and we are quick to adopt this system. The market puts out loads of disposable products declaring that it will make our lives easier and more convenient. North America is only 5% of the world’s population, yet we produce 30% of the world’s waste(9). We must ask ourselves, “do we really need these things?” and “can we live with what we have?” Perhaps our culture today is filled with the notion that happiness can be bought, that you could put a price tag on anything as long as you have the cash or resource and can be amongst the privileged and fortunate. There needs to be an end to this mentality that has swept our nation, we have become conditioned to expect the impossible that we have made possible through oil. To think that produce from Asia, South America are just around the corner, tastes of India and Egyptian cottons at our local market, home theatre systems and furniture from one of many big box companies—it is easy to get what you want whenever you want. What happens when these items are no longer readily available? Is our nation prepared for that?
For everything we produce there is at least an equal amount produced in trash. Waste is a scalar thing and also has no scale—it is everywhere, from a candy wrapper to large mountainous landfills. The term waste designates the elimination of substance that no one claims or wants ownership of and is a devalued substance at the end of its life cycle. Biological substances and cells produce waste, we produce waste, machines and products produce waste—there is no growth biologically and economically without discarding the unwanted. We cannot control it, therefore we must accept it and find innovative solutions to make waste a valued substance, since it is the only abundant source of the future.
This topic is a growing problem, yet majority of us are in denial. It is not so much as it being a massive object we should take care of, we should think about waste and its huge environmental impacts on our societies today. Most large de-industrialized sites are located within proximity of local water sources; naturally, this is also where majority of the people congregate. Water scarcity is already a problem, as only 3% of the earth’s water is potable and that includes contaminated waters by industries, not to mention toxicity levels that seep into our water and soil we grow our food in. We can also expect increasing amounts of water related diseases in the near future.
We have the resources now to move trash and hide problems like these, but the future does not look bright as oil depletion, water scarcity, global warming, and resource scarcity correlate simultaneously into an unforgiving future. By putting waste material to good use allows dual purposes, it simultaneously reduces the burden on natural resources and second, reduces the quantity of waste to be eliminated. We must also curve the two associated fatalities that economic growth and increase in garbage are derivatives of each other and seek to reevaluate waste as a secondary resource. Life cycle analysis tools consider the overall composition of a material from inception to usage and the environmental impacts that go along with it, from “cradle to grave”. So in construction, the stages of extraction, preparation, processing, manufacturing, shipping, then construction, maintenance, repair, and lastly demolition; new policies are attempting to shift from discarding the material to creating a “grave to cradle” scenario, where reutilization and recycling becomes an important backbone for our future economy(10).
There are of course both pros and cons with reutilizing and recycling, first, that the energy initially invested in creating the product will be more profitable with reuse, however there may be environmental implications with some materials that are classified as toxic non reusable materials. We as architects must take responsibility primarily with the safe remediation of toxic material before implementing the rehabilitation and resurrection of inanimate materials and objects. There is an immense variety of material resources in existence beyond the traditional, everything points to the direction of maximizing the value of waste. The definition between reutilization and recycling is often mistaken—recycling maximizes the value of the constitutive material, and reutilization preserves the initial form. For my thesis, I would like to focus more heavily on the reutilization of discarded objects.
In favour of reduction, reutilization lowers costs by avoiding extraction of natural aggregates and other primary elements, as well as the costs of transporting and unloading natural aggregates and waste. It also allows history to procure in an object by lessening the transformable stages in the material’s life, opposite to recycling, and at the same time maximizing its value in terms of revenue and most importantly to the environment—as there are a lot of chemical processes involved with recycling. In some ways, retaining its original form allows us to view it as an artwork woven into the urban fabric, where ideally, these objects will eventually become the norm and standard of the built environment. The problem however, lies in the psychology that—waste as a matter is useful—and people do not want to accept this. I want to shift the mentality from things that our society devalue into something of value, where people will begin to reclaim ownership of the discarded.
The reutilization of garbage in art has been a reoccurring theme for many years, since 1913 when Marcel Duchamp created his first ready-made from a bicycle wheel and called it art. He wanted to instill the idea that garbage could be art and sought to blur the fine line between art and garbage. Though the fine line is not yet evident in the field of architecture, recent attempts by various architects has sought to redefine our profession as the be-all and end-all of the future—with the sustainability of our environment in mind. While the utilization of waste in art is becoming the norm, it is not so foreign in architecture. Since its origins, architecture has used the “waste” of agriculture as a primary material. These inedible parts—wood, hay, reed, bamboo—are often the primary ingredients that make up a building(11). So instead of utilizing organic waste, is it possible to adapt it with the use of synthetic or man-made waste?
Architects are amongst the privileged when it comes to the ability to visualize a project as a whole entity and to bring it into materialization much more efficiently than any other profession. It is from our creative free flowing ideas and knowledge of the built environment and its culture that allows us to see the emerging problems as an integrated framework of systems. We also have the knowledge for sustainable construction and the use of materials in efforts to conserve resources. It should be our objective to open up the markets for secondary resource exploitations, where we advocate the vast potential for innovations in waste and its construction benefits.
Notes:
8. Annie Leonard, “The Untold Story of Consumerism,” Kabbalah Today. Apr./May 2006, 29 Oct. 2009,
9. Annie Leonard, “The Untold Story of Consumerism,” Kabbalah Today. Apr./May 2006, 29 Oct. 2009,
10. Gérard Bertonlini, “Gestion des Déchets: My Poubelle is rich,” L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui Sept./Oct. 2007: 53
11. Yona Friedman, “Du Déchet fait art,” L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui Sept./Oct. 2007: 81
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