Unwanted Project: Speculative Design for Circularity

Abstract

More than 360 million tons of plastic are produced each year (2020, global plastic report), and only 9% can be recycled properly. With increasing climate change and the inevitable single-use waste stream produced in our everyday life, plastic pollution is rapidly outpacing the current effort to stop it. We couldn’t ignore the impact of the ‘throwaway living’ we developed almost 7 decades ago anymore. Thus, many efforts, from commercial and official bodies to grassroots plastic-recycling groups, have acted in the format of policy change, awareness enhancement, design, and innovation, to explore the potential of turning the current linear process into plastic material lifecycle into circular loops. These initiatives have laid the foundation for wide-reaching voluntary cooperation and repurposing of wasted materials into the upcycled future.

While the official and commercialized efforts take a significant role in easing plastic pollution, we couldn’t ignore the grassroots and the bottom-up efforts from unofficial organizations that help to create these closed loops. Instead of relieving plastic pollution as a global issue, this thesis, ‘Unwanted Project (UP)’, takes an eye on the possibility of plastic repurposing from an individual and community level, as well as investigates what can be done to realize the circularity at the in-home level from a creative and repurposing perspective. This thesis firstly investigated material repurpose and reusing from multiple levels, from official recycling action to grassroots global plastic recycling community, and then dug into the communities and individuals to evaluate the potential of closing the material flow loop, enhancing collection capacity, as well as creating capability of production with qualitative and quantitative research. The results are three design scenarios. Through individual-level manufacture, ranging from 3D printing to heat pressing, ‘UP’ created scenarios that enable individuals to follow from their homes and community, to repurpose the plastic waste they collected in their daily life. These three scenarios are modulized and streamlined to provide a standard basis for the implementation, as well as leave creative space for individuals to up-cycle plastic with flexibility and purpose.