Waste into wealth: designs to cap consumerism

Think of all your previous phones and why you needed to replace them. You probably needed to substitute a broken part or simply wanted an upgrade. While many old phones still technically work, they frequently end up in the landfill – accounting for millions of tonnes in e-waste every year.

Phonebloks, designed by serial problem-solver Dave Hakkens, is a modular smartphone system consisting of 20 to 30 third-party components called ‘bloks’ attached to a main board.

Each blok serves a different purpose and users can build their own personalised smartphone according to their needs. And when a blok is broken, simply replace it, or add components to expand the functionality.

In addition to the freedom of choice and only paying for what you need, Phonebloks also planned to provide a marketplace where users would be able to buy and sell new and used bloks.

Aside from being an innovative product, Phonebloks is the beginning of a growing movement helping to steer the mobile phone industry into a new and much more sustainable direction. From a flat to a circular economy that creates longer-lasting, open-source products with less environmental impact.

While there was plenty of interest in this kind of system, from the likes of Google, Xiaomi, ZTE and many more, the modular phone is. Let’s hope it’s not too long before we see this kind of more sustainable product on the shelves.

Plastic: a product designed to provide perfect convenience that’s now one of humanity’s biggest problems. It’s littered through our forests and fields, floating in our oceans, leaving almost no place on Earth untouched.

While the most helpful solution to capping this epidemic is it to stop producing it altogether, designer Dave Hakkens has come up with an incredible idea to make good use of what’s already out there.

The Precious Plastic movement teaches people to make original products from plastic they’d otherwise toss. Through video tutorials and detailed plans, users can build various recycling machines and moulds to create new useful items.

The machines are designed to be as accessible and inclusive as possible. They’re made from basic affordable materials, are easy to build and are modular, so they can be adapted to different contexts and needs.

Not only does the project show us the incredible opportunities for recycling plastic, it also reduces the demand for new virgin plastic while making sure less ends up in the landfill. Some have even used the tools to establish a new source of income for some.

By providing quality open-source knowledge, the initiative aims to help establish recycling knowledge and infrastructure in communities across the globe. Above all, Precious Plastic is a cultural tool to change the way our global society perceives plastic.

Around about one-third of all food produced is wasted. That’s approximately 1.3 billion tonnes globally per year, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Association. This waste occurs in many places along the supply chain but it’s at the consumer end where it’s most problematic.

This is predominantly due to strict laws regarding shelf-life and the demand for certain meals and products to eaten the day they’re made. In essence, a lot of edible food is tossed at the end of each day.

That’s where Too Good To Go comes in: a hyperlocal app that links its user with this delicious food that would otherwise be tossed. Through the app, you can order meals, which cost as little as US$2.50, from local restaurants, cafes and bakeries.

The dishes can be collected up to an hour before closing time and are served in an environmentally-friendly sugarcane box. Users also have the option to donate meals to the homeless – delivery and practicalities are all arranged free of charge by Too Good To Go.

Too Good To Go app is currently active in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

So far, more than 1,000,000 meals have been sold through the app – the equivalent of more than 1500 tonnes of CO2! The initiative is a serious contender for placing the lost value back onto food as humankind’s most valuable energy resource, and not something that should just be carelessly thrown in the bin.

Today, most people know about recycling and engage with it to some degree, but many of us still either throw away or store old and unused electronics, simply because we don’t know what to do with them.

It’s estimated that only about 20% of the world’s e-waste is recycled. The remaining 80% is burned or dumped in landfills, leaking toxic substances like mercury, lead and arsenic into the environment.

But, there is an alternative: feeding the unwanted electronics to ecoATM.

Not dissimilar to a regular ATM, the ecoATM will eject cash in return for your unwanted devices. The automated self-serve kiosk uses advanced machine vision, electronic diagnostics, and artificial intelligence to examine any device and then search for the highest price it can find in the worldwide market. The whole process takes just a few minutes to complete.

ecoATMs are able to find a second life for approximately 60% of the devices they collect. For the other 40%, the company partners with the best e-waste reclamation facilities to ensure those materials, particularly the precious metals, are reclaimed and reused in place of mining new materials and precious metals.

The Swedish Government has introduced tax breaks on repairs to discourage throwing out old or broken items to buy new ones.

On bikes and clothes, VAT has been reduced from 25% to 12%, and on white goods, consumers can claim back income tax for the labour on repairs. Estimates suggest that the VAT cut will reduce the cost of a repair worth $46.00 by about $5.60.

Policymakers hope the break will spur the creation of a new home-repairs service industry, providing much-needed jobs for new immigrants who lack formal education.

“We believe that this could substantially lower the cost and so make it more rational economic behaviour to repair your goods,” said Per Bolund, Sweden’s Minister for Financial Markets and Consumer Affairs.

The incentives are part of a shift in government focus from reducing carbon emissions produced domestically to reducing emissions tied to goods produced elsewhere. Sweden has already cut its annual emissions of carbon dioxide by 23% since 1990.