material flow management

Talking ’bout photography, I stumbled across this site by a photographer called Chris Jordan. It covers “Portraits of American Mass Consumption” and gives a brilliant insight into our consumer waste society. All we produce is waste.

Mobile Phones

Anyone in need of a mobile phone?
(since I do repair broken stuff like mobile phones in my free time, this pic is particularly sad for me….)

I always thought the only way to fight those amounts of waste and pollution would be by producing less…. Wrong!

Instead, as my wacky prof wrote in his famous book, we have to look at the way nature does it and start redesigning our products. Or, as he puts it: “A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective… Waste equals food.”

I mean, have you ever looked at it from this kind of perspective? Producing even more than needed and yet, everything in surplus equals nutrition for the enviornment (humans, nature, etc.). Products will be made out of biological or technical nutrients and thus remain within a cycle. The cycle of life. Not those one-way solutions as pictured above.
I am truly fascinated by the idea, and I strongly believe that our generation has to identify and develope products that are eco-effective and remain within a life-cycle (Eco Effectiveness = Economic Viability + Social Acceptability + Environmental Performance). Technology gives us so many possibilities and it just depends on us how we arrange all this potential.

Author: jke

Hi, I am an engineer who freelances in water & sanitation-related IT projects at Saniblog.org. You'll also find me on Twitter @jke and Instagram.