The countercultural art movement began with a group of students at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kinshasa, who decided to make art from what they could find around them. Most of what they found was the waste of faraway strangers: tires, foam, bottles, paint cans, CDs, flip-flops, exhaust pipes, and more. In 2015, the artists founded the collective Ndaku Ya Life is Beautiful, led by Eddy Ekete, and began performing while wearing their startlingly creative costumes.

Each costume echoes the ancestral clothing arts of the Congolese, and each has its own story to tell. Jared Kalenga’s “Robot Annonce” is a suit made of broken radio parts in a warning against the spread of fake news. “Femme Électrique” is a costume made of electrical wiring by Falonne Mambu, symbolizing the Congo’s inconsistent electrical service and the kidnappings and sexual assaults that occur when the lights go out.

“Tin Can” by Mvunzi Muteba Jr. aims to raise awareness among Africans about how the presence of multinational companies (such as those mining for rare minerals) has affected the continent and kept its citizens poor despite its many riches. “Tire Man” by Savant Noir is a protest of those stolen resources, like the rubber used to manufacture tires. Other issues represented by the costumes and performances include gang violence, viruses, pollution, a lack of safe drinking water, and the Western-style consumerism that’s beginning to creep into the country.

Gladieu’s photos capture these costumes against relevant backdrops, including graffitied concrete walls, industrial sites, gutters full of trash, and public street markets with locals looking on. In publishing the book, he hopes the levity and creativity of the images will catch the attention of Westerners who don’t want to be guilted into caring about where their waste ends up. His approach celebrates the Congolese culture and the resilience of the community of Kinshasa, sharing the ways in which the artists have reclaimed their experiences and translated them into something beautiful.

“(In the photographs), we are talking about ecology, but we are talking about ecology through African masks,” says Gladieu. “As you can see, they’re completely covered up. You don’t see any part of the skin. The traditional masks were done with natural materials. They symbolized the spirit of the ancestors or the spirit of support of the natural world. These young artists reinvent these traditional masks in a way, but they do it today with trash because they find more trash and natural materials.”

Published by Actes Sud, Homo Détritus was released in hardcover in November 2022 and is now available for backorder from Bookshop.org. You can see more of these images at Gladieu’s website, and on Instagram.

The post Stephen Gladieu’s New Book Spotlights the Congo’s Protest Art Against Western Trash first appeared on Dornob.

“Humanity’s excessive production of material waste poses a critical environmental threat, and the problem is only escalating, especially in the past few decades with the rapid development of powerful electronic tools and persistent consumer desire to upgrade to the newest available technology,” the team, led by Professor Soekheun Choi, wrote in a paper published in the ASC Applied Materials and Interfaces journal.

“The poor disposability of electronics,” the researchers continue, “is especially an issue for the newly arising field of single-use devices and sensors, which are often used to evaluate human health and monitor environmental conditions, and for other novel applications. Though impressive in terms of function and convenience, usage of conventional electronic components in these applications would inflict an immense surge in waste and result in higher costs.”

Traditional circuit boards are manufactured from resin, glass fibers, and metal wiring, making them somewhat bulky and harder to recycle. That means that millions of single-use circuits in things like personal wearable devices, point-of-care medical devices, and environmental monitors simply get tossed in the trash every day.

In response to this issue, the team — assembled from the University’s Bioelectrics and Microsystems Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering — turned to an exercise in “papertronics.” They created a single-use, amplifier-type electronic circuit board made from renewable and biodegradable materials like paper and wax.

The started by printing out electronic channels using wax onto a single sheet of filter paper. The wax was heated to 266 degrees Fahrenheit for two minutes so it could soak completely through the paper. The next step was to fill in all the areas not covered in wax with both semi-conductive and conductive ink. The team then screen-printed conductive metal components onto the paper before bonding the layers together with Thru-hole technology. Lastly, they cast a gel-based electrolyte at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes onto the sheet.

The tiny, flexible circuit board proved effective when it came to resistor, capacitor, and transistor functions. If left unused, it could biodegrade over time with minimal permanent waste left behind — but the team also demonstrated that the board could be completely disintegrated within seconds with just the smallest of flames. And because of the limited amount of materials required, producing these paper circuit boards would likely be very inexpensive, and easily scalable for mass production.

Professor Choi and his team are excited by the potential their creation has to curb e-waste on a global scale. As they explain: “All electronic components are paper-based and integrated on paper-based printed circuit boards (PCBs), innovatively providing a realistic and practical solution for green electronic platforms.”

The post Research Team Creates Paper Circuit Board to Curb E-Waste first appeared on Dornob.

Wastewater management tends to be a big problem in rural India. In villages like Kundli, located on the outskirts of Dehli, hundreds of factories have popped up in a matter of decades, often releasing water contaminated with chemicals directly into the ground. The problem is that these factories, which manufacture items like plastics, rubber, jewelry, and polyester, typically don’t have enough space for high-tech water treatment solutions, even if they could afford them. The pollutants in turn make their way into groundwater and nearby waterways, contaminating the local bathing and drinking water.

The Indus tile system’s algae-based bioremediation process involves placing a wastewater tank on top of the building and then allowing gravity to funnel the water though “veins” in the “leaves.” The designers traveled to India and observed the production processes of textile dyers in Panipat and bangle makers in Kolkata, where various processes release different types of heavy metals into the wastewater. The team found that one particular type of algae was able to reduce cadmium levels in the water by 10 times within 45 minutes.

Fabricated in Khurja, India, which is known for its ceramics, the Indus tiles are made of clay and deeply textured to hold onto a viscous hydrogel containing the most promising pollution-busting species of algae. The vein-like channels are shaped by an algorithm to optimize their ability to absorb pollutants. As the water flows over a tile, the microscopic algae cells absorb and store the substances for energy. The hydrogel acts as a “biological scaffold” that keeps the algae alive, and it’s biodegradable. The materials required to prepare the hydrogel and algae cells can be supplied in a powdered form and reapplied to the tiles as needed.

The modular tiles fit together into a beautiful pattern using half-lap joints, so individual tiles can be replaced as necessary without disassembling the entire wall. This also makes it easy to scale the wall size up or down, tailoring it to each site. In the future, the designers hope to integrate a second phase in which the saturated hydrogel packed with heavy metals is removed and sold to high-tech companies, which can use the metals in their own manufacturing processes. The Indus tiles are set to undergo performance tests in the UK and then a pilot project in India itself.

The creators imagine adapting Indus wall tiles to different regions and needs, making them from local materials like stone or even waste materials. Different tiles could be tailored to different pollutants, infused with the particular type of algae that works best in that context. Given that the end result is so beautiful, it’s not hard to imagine the concept extending to residential applications, too. Just imagine installing a wall of these at the edge of your own roof instead of a gutter, cleaning rainwater for personal use later on.

The post Leaf-Shaped Wall Tiles Full of Living Algae Absorb Pollutants from Rainwater first appeared on Dornob.

What will characterize our own time on Earth? Sadly, it seems like the most enduring thing we’ll leave behind is trillions of plastic particles that will still be present in every corner of the globe 1,000 years from now. London architecture firm Vatraa makes this point in vivid fashion with “The Plastic Monument,” a roughly 21-foot-tall Stonehenge replica standing in a plaza in southern Milan. Winner of National Geographic’s 2019 “Planet or Plastic” design competition, the sculpture is made out of 16,000 recycled plastic bottles.

“Taking the form of a trilithon, one of the oldest forms of structure inherited from our ancestors, the monument draws the attention to the consequences of our actions in the long run, to the fact that what we are doing today might stay on Earth forever,” say the architects. “The installation poses a stark contrast between a single-use, disposable material and the eternity of the trilithon. Made of pressed PET bottle bales — the raw material for the plastic recycling plants – it educates the public into the recycling process by illustrating its first steps, just before the material is shredded, washed, and melted into new bottles.”

Thousands of crushed bottles are held together in three stone slab-like rectangular shapes made of wire mesh, making it clear that the “monument” is made of single-use plastic trash. It sits on two solid steel blocks as a foundation and stands just slightly smaller than the real Stonehenge. That enables it to stand up to strong winds — and be disassembled for display in other cities in the future.

“When we think of what our ancestors left to us, we think of real assets made of brick or stone, like the pyramids, the Colosseum, or Stonehenge,” says Bogdan Rusu, founding partner at Vatraa. “But part of our legacy to the next generation might also be plastic waste…Hundreds of years down the line our great-great-great grandchildren might find disposable plastic items that we just got rid of today because it was so convenient to us.”

If you find that to be a depressing thought, then the monument has done its job. Whether our actual contemporary architectural creations someday become their own “ancient monuments” may not matter. Even if humanity survives the coming climate catastrophe, future generations will likely think of us in terms of the pollution we contributed to the planet rather than our more admirable achievements.

The Plastic Monument will remain on display in Milan until next October, when Vatraa hopes it will embark upon a world tour to spread awareness about the consequences of our collective actions.

The post Plastic Monument: Stonehenge Recreated in Milan Using 16,000 Discarded Bottles first appeared on Dornob.

Currently wrapping up a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the Shelfy sort of looks like a misplaced Apple device. It’s a minimalist white pod that you tuck onto one of your refrigerator shelves to let it do its magic. Taking up less space than a gallon of milk, the Shelfy extends shelf life up to 12 days, reduces bad odors by 80 percent, and results in up to 10 times less bacterial load inside the refrigerator.

To use it, you just select the mode you want (eco, standard, or boost); place it in the fridge wherever it fits best, including in a drawer or door; and reap the benefits. Shelfy’s makers claim the device can keep some vegetables like zucchini good for as long as 22 days, and extend the lives of fast-rotting foods like strawberries by up to a week.

Food waste is a major contributor to environmental crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, requiring tons of resources and land to grow food that people don’t end up eating (and emitting methane gases when it rots). A single family spends an average of almost $2,000 a year on food that they end up throwing away. Shelfy cites studies that show one out of every two refrigerators has an above-average proliferation of mold and bacteria, contributing to the problem.

The Shelfy uses an advanced ceramic filter, a silent fan, and a battery to take in air inside the refrigerator through mechanical ventilation, passing it through a photocatalytic filter that destroys pollutants. After a while, it’ll notify you that it’s time to remove the filter and wash it under running water, or charge it via a USB-C plug. You can control it with the Vitesy Hub app and connect it to Amazon Alexa and Google Home via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The Shelfy also monitors your refrigerator’s energy consumption based on how many times you open the door.

The designers explain that they “conducted research at CSI SpA – FPM Laboratory (Food Packaging Materials), an Italian and European technological hub with a team of about 400 experts including engineers, physicists, chemists,and microbiologists who have made quality, safety, and sustainability the backbone of their professional role. They’re recognized as a center of excellence, especially for companies in the food, packaging, construction, and automotive sectors, in which every day, for more than 25 years, they have been working to enhance quality companies and protect the market.”

“Shelfy uses an innovative and sustainable nanomaterial-based photocatalytic technology since the filter doesn’t need to be replaced, just washed under running water. Photocatalysis is a safe chemical reaction that absorbs air pollutants and turns them into harmless elements. The use of this technology guarantees safety, better performance, and less consumption. In this way, we make Vitesy technology sustainable and effective.”

If you missed the Shelfy’s Kickstarter campaign, you’ll be able to pick one up soon for the retail price of €169 (about $175).

The post Fight Food Waste in Your Fridge with the Shelfy Smart Purifier first appeared on Dornob.

In conventional batteries, there’s a positive electric terminal at one end and a negative terminal at the other, with either lead or lithium in between as the liquid, paste, or gel electrolyte substance that propels ions back and forth to generate electricity. Scientists and engineers at the University of Maryland found a way to replace that lead and lithium with chitosan, a polysaccharide sugar that gives the outer skeletons of shellfish their strength and flexibility. Even better, that chitosan can be sourced from materials that are usually thrown away as a byproduct of the food industry. The researchers published their discovery this month in the journal Matter.

“The most abundant source of chitosan is the exoskeletons of crustaceans, including crabs, shrimps, and lobsters, which can be easily obtained from seafood waste,” said lead author and Materials Science and Engineering Professor Liangbing Hu, director of UMD’s Center for Materials Innovation. “You can find it on your table.”

Chitosan can be synthesized into a firm gel membrane with the addition of acetic acid aqueous solution, combined with zinc, and then used as an electrolyte for a battery. Zinc is an abundant naturally occurring metal found in more than 50 countries around the world. It’s used to make batteries safer, and it’s recyclable. That means the major components of the batteries are cheap and readily available, a crucial consideration when so many so-called “sustainable” innovations require the mining of rare minerals.

“Zinc is more abundant in Earth’s crust than lithium,” notes Hu. “Generally speaking, well-developed zinc batteries are cheaper and safer.”

The UMD researchers found that their chitosan-based battery is 99.7-percent energy efficient even after 1,000 battery cycles (about 400 hours of use). That means they can be quickly charged and discharged without affecting their performance. They’re also not flammable, and two-thirds of their composition can break down in the soil within a mere five months, leaving the zinc behind to be recycled. The next step will involve testing the batteries on a larger scale and under commercial use conditions. If successful, these biodegradable batteries could be used in tandem with solar panels, wind farms, hydropower, and other green energy solutions.

“In the future, I hope all components in batteries are biodegradable,” said Hu. “Not only the material itself but also the fabrication process of biomaterials.”

The post Discarded Crab and Lobster Shells Fuel a New Biodegradable Battery first appeared on Dornob.

The project combines StoneCycling’s expertise in construction waste mitigation with Biomason’s innovative biocement, a binder that produces a material made by bacteria and sand. Combined with StoneCycling’s recaptured mineral waste, the biocement becomes a tile that’s three times stronger and 20 percent lighter than typical concrete masonry while maintaining a near-zero carbon footprint. And while conventional cement takes 28 days to fully cure, precast modules of BioBased tile cure in just 72 hours.

Ginger Krieg Dosier, co-founder and CEO of Biomason, has spent the last nine years searching for a way to “grow” cement bricks and tiles with bacteria. The process sounds pretty fascinating. Biomason uses natural micro-organisms to produce carbon-based material in ambient temperatures just like coral does in nature, though exactly how they manage to do that is apparently proprietary information.

That carbon is combined with calcium to produce biocement materials, which can even be seeded with marine microorganisms to give it self-healing abilities and enable it to anchor itself to the ocean floor and create marine infrastructure, breakwater assemblies, and near-shore sediment stabilization.

BioBased tiles shape the biocement into easy-to-use modules with all sorts of applications, so it can be used almost exactly like traditional concrete. They’ve been installed at businesses around the world, including the Dropbox headquarters in California and Helix Lab in Denmark. More recently, Biomason struck a deal with retailer H&M to install it in many of the company’s 5,000-plus retail locations around the world.

If it continues to take off, this bio-based material could make a huge environmental impact. Concrete’s carbon footprint is currently larger than the entire aviation industry and those of the countries of China and India. It’s also the second most in-demand substance in the world after water. Biomason estimates that its biocement could eliminate 25 percent of the concrete industry’s global carbon emissions by 2030.

“The demand for low-carbon building materials is clear,” says StoneCycling’s Massa. The aim of our partnership with Biomason is to accelerate the use of sustainable building materials and architecture even further. We share the belief in our collective ability to solve climate change, and we’re thrilled to be working with Biomason on new low-carbon products to revolutionize the construction industry.”

“Since our inception 10 years ago, we have focused not only on disrupting the cement industry with groundbreaking technology, but also in establishing a licensing and partnership ecosystem to enable broad adoption of our solutions throughout the construction industry,” Krieg Dosier says. “StoneCycling will be a key partner as we scale commercially and bring BioBased tiles to the European market.”

The post BioBased Tiles: Bacteria Used to Grow Strong and Sustainable Cement Alternative first appeared on Dornob.

Whether it’s trash, treasure, or sunken historical cargo washing up on sandy shores around the world, there’s no doubt that what’s been washing up on the Texas Coastal Bend is undoubtedly the creepiest of them all: sand and debris-encrusted plastic dolls that would give even horror movie veteran Chucky a run for his money.

While the area, which is around 30 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, is no stranger to trash washing up onshore due to a “loop current” that pushes debris toward the area, these dolls are reoccurring visitors that are exceedingly unsettling. Often dismembered and deformed from their travels, some might even call them the stuff of nightmares.

Twice a week, researchers at the Mission-Arkansas Reserve at the University of Texas trawl the stretch of coast between Padre Island and Matagorda Island looking for wildlife like sea turtles, marine mammals, and even endangered bird species. What they often find instead is all the trash that washes ashore, including the uber-creepy dolls that have been showing their distorted and maniacal little faces for years now.

The dolls specifically seem to be drawn to the area. Haunted? Unlikely. A result of the area’s current washing up excess debris from Mexico? Probably. Jace Tunnell, the Director of the Mission-Arkansas Reserve, says: “Texas coastal bend beaches get ten times the amount of trash than any other beach in the Gulf of Mexico,” and this is perhaps why the dolls are so prevalent. However, this entirely scientific reasoning certainly does not detract from the eeriness of the dolls themselves — after all, the current explains the trash and debris, but what explains the dolls themselves?

While the researchers don’t have answers to this creepy conundrum, they do find it amusing, and even, as Tunnell has said, a “perk” of the job, posting images of the distorted dollies on a social media account that’s gone on to garner a cult following. “Everyday is something new,” he told McClatchy News. “Just when you think you’ve found everything that could possibly wash up on shore, something else comes up.”

If you find yourself on this lovely corner of Texas coast, don’t be surprised if you see the occasional deranged looking doll on the beach. They may not be haunted, but they’re certainly more evidence of the appallingly polluted state of our oceans.

The post Why Do These Deformed Dolls Keep Washing Up on the Texas Coastline? first appeared on Dornob.

When a Swedish newspaper publicized a year ago that there were more than 200 electric scooters lying at the bottom of the Malmö canals, four designers banded together to solve the problem, creating a company called Andra Formen, or “Second Form” in Swedish.

“We let others’ bad decisions inspire us and take our starting point in mistakes when we start a new project. How could a material, a place, or a phenomenon be made differently? Could [it] be done better?” the team writes on their website.

They started by enlisting the aid of two brave divers to fish abandoned two-wheelers out of the murky water. “Some of them had barnacles growing on them,” co-founder Christian Svensson notes. The designers estimated that many of electric transporters hadn’t even survived a year of usefulness before being ditched in the seaway.

After giving each scooter a good scrub, the team took them apart and laid out their inventory of components, looking for design revelations. The result is a collection of desk and floor lamps, a chair, a hydroponic planter, and a grill, all under the name “E-metabolism.”

“Our mission is to turn toxic waste in the form of electric scooters from the bottom of the canal into pieces of art,” adds Oskar Olsson, who designed many of the pieces himself. He adds: “We tried to stay true to the shapes of the scooters. Some even have dents and scratches, and they tell a story about the life it had before.”

Olsson and Svesson, along with partners Jingbei Zheng and Peder Nilsson, used the original parts as much as possible: a dead battery for the base of the floor lamp, handlebars and decks for the chair legs and seat, hubcaps as a base for the desk lamp, and handlebars for the lamp neck and head. Connector pieces from the cast-off scooters fashion the furniture together, with a few bits of 3D-printed material here and there tying it all together.

The aesthetic of the pieces has a colorful modern feel with an air of recycled chic, keeping the original hues and branding from the salvaged Voi, Bolt, and Tier scooters. While the playfully quirky furniture would be difficult to scale up based on the limited supply of scooters from waterway graveyards, the intention behind the work is a helpful reminder of our responsibility to preserve natural resources.

“We wanted to show that you can actually do something with waste,” says Svensson. “It doesn’t need to go to the dump.”

The group adds that “With this project we want to challenge our contemporaries to look past environmental degradation and see how today’s materials can be resources tomorrow.”

All the repurposed products in the E-metabolism line are on display on the Andre Formen website, with prices ranging from $200 to $800. Interested parties must fill out an email form for potential purchases.

The post Sunken E-Scooters Get New Life as Recycled Furniture first appeared on Dornob.

It all started when Goodman traveled back to Canada in early April 2020 only to find three feet of snow and a frozen lake waiting for her, watching the earth slowly warm up in early spring. Each morning, she spent hours sitting in the cold listening to the chickadees and other little birds, learning to identify them all by sound. Binoculars and birding books helped her sharpen her perception. By the time she returned to Rhode Island, she had developed a new practice of listening and cultivating knowledge. She began to notice things like plastic bags in ditches, masks discarded on the street, and piles of trash along the train tracks.

“On the first day of classes I walked by the big blue bin outside the sculpture foundry,” Goodman writes in her senior thesis. “I had passed this bin every day the year before and had never given it a second thought. This time, when I approached it, the sun was casting its last rays of the day on the alleyway behind our studios before dipping behind the Metcalf Building. It was as if the container was glowing, light refracting off misshapen and abandoned objects. The bin was signaling to me, drawing me toward the limitless possibilities within it. I put on my welding gloves and began dragging out rusted metal scraps, contorted, some haphazardly fused together. I found a wide piece of steel tubing, some rebar, and some steel rod a student had bent into a squiggly shape. I took these items to the mig welder and made my first piece of the year. It was a chair, it was sittable, and it was like nothing I had ever made before.”

“I was actively unlearning while simultaneously knowing more. The materials were speaking to me, telling me how they should be processed and shaped. It was as if they had always been trying to talk to me but in a frequency I could not hear. Suddenly, I heard everything. I could recognize my lane again and it was going in a completely new direction. I decided that day I wouldn’t go to the store anymore. There was nothing I needed that I couldn’t find in my surroundings. Undervalued items everywhere. Pure potential tossed in the ditch while thinking, this trash is someone else’s problem. Maybe it could be my problem. I could create second chances and see value all around me. All I had to do was listen.”

The resulting objects might not even be recognizable as furniture on first glance. There’s something almost alien about them, sitting on whip-like curving metal supports reminiscent of the antennae of insects or the tentacles of deep sea creatures. All of these pieces of steel, found throughout Providence, were collected and processed with oxy-acetylene before being welded and spray painted. Ultimately, Goodman sees them as a physical representation of the city itself, and of the people who used and discarded those materials.

“This Trash is Someone Else’s Problem” is deeply informed by indigenous stewardship and the history of the surrounding area, advocating for design justice and social equality as well as a sense of responsibility for the objects we create. It’s also an interesting representation of Goodman’s lesson in its own right, as the final products are less important than the actual process of conceptualizing and creating them.

The post Lauren Goodman Turns Your Trash into Functional Furniture first appeared on Dornob.

This month, the growing “Right to Repair” movement scored a big victory: Apple has finally agreed to allow users to self-service their products.

Apple’s New Self-Service Repair Program

Set to begin in the U.S. in early 2022, the new Apple Self Service Repair program will provide access to necessary parts and tools to do repairs on Apple devices yourself. The first phase will focus on “the most commonly serviced modules,” including the camera, display, and battery for the iPhone 12 and 13. Additional iPhone parts, as well as those for Mac computers with M1 chips, will come later.

The process requires customers to review the repair manual first, then order the parts and tools they need (the same used by experts at Apple Genius Bars) in a new section of the Apple store. When they return the used parts for recycling, they’ll get a credit toward the purchase. Provided they follow instructions, self-repairers won’t void the product’s warranty.

That doesn’t mean just anyone will be able to perform complex repairs on delicate electronics, of course. Per Apple’s press release, “Self Service Repair is intended for individual technicians with the knowledge and experience to repair electronic devices. For the vast majority of customers, visiting a professional repair provider with certified technicians who use genuine Apple parts is the safest and most reliable way to get a repair.”

Better Access to Service Locations with Genuine Apple Parts

Finding authorized repair shops has been part of the problem all along. Historically, Apple has gone to great lengths to limit repairs to a select few approved (and often overpriced) service providers, claiming they were protecting customers from unscrupulous businesses. But the company also admitted that they were protecting their own “proprietary hardware,” going so far as to create special screws that make it impossible for customers to open their own devices. Plus, authorized repair shops are typically harder to find in low-income communities, putting a greater financial burden on people who really can’t afford to replace their devices.

The problem was significant enough to get President Biden’s attention. He signed an executive order in July encouraging the Federal Trade Commission to require companies to allow DIY repairs, and the FTC ultimately adopted a new policy granting consumers the right to repair their own devices. “These types of restrictions can significantly raise costs for consumers, stifle innovation, close off business opportunity for independent repair shops, create unnecessary electronic waste, delay timely repairs, and undermine resiliency,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan.

Apple points to its Independent Repair Provider program, launched in 2019, as a significant step toward making repairs more accessible to consumers. The company has nearly doubled the number of service providers since then, with about 2,800 providers in 200 countries. While that’s definitely an important achievement, allowing DIY repair is a crucial step toward reducing the whopping 57.4 million metric tons of electronic waste generated each year.

Next, let’s pressure companies to actually take full responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products, including responsible recycling overseen by an independent third party. It’s the only way we’re going to get corporations to quit producing disposable products for good.

The post Apple Will Finally Allow Customers to Fix Their Own Devices first appeared on Dornob.

In fact, there’s now such a huge selection of strange Chinese buildings to choose from, Archy.com started an annual Ugliest Building Survey, and its 12th annual contest has a whopping 87 contenders in the running. That number may dwindle in the years to come, since President Xi Jinping issued a government directive calling for an end to “oversized, xenocentric, weird” projects, and that’s part of the point of the contest. The organizers hope pointing out ugly architecture will “promote architects’ social responsibility” and cut back on wastefulness.

Voting is open until December, when a commission of architects will select the final 10 winners. Here are some of the projects currently in the lead:

Donping Poly Plaza, Foshan, Guangdong

Nobody really wants a big imposing building in their city to look sort of like a modernized Eye of Sauron, do they? Incorporating a four-story atrium with a flying staircase design, a basement level, and four towers, this complex is supposed to be a lively gathering place for residents of Foshan New City. The reasons Archy listed for nominating this project include “extremely inharmonious with the surrounding environment and natural conditions,” “idolizes Western culture,” and “weird and vulgar.” Voters mostly just think it’s depressing.

Xi’an International Children’s Art Museum, Shanghai

Some people think this school inspired by the “Arabian Magic Carpet” is cute and fitting for its purpose, with its undulating roof and facade full of round cut-outs. Others seem to be experiencing a touch of trypophobia (fear of holes). It has been called “really psychologically uncomfortable,” “disgusting,” “vulgar” and even “secret terrorism.” One voter wrote of the building’s pale beige curves and orifices, “it’s like a breathing monster composed entirely of flesh and blood.”

Glass Bridge Tower of Jiuhuanghsan Mountain in Mianyang, Sichuan

Something about the monumental figures standing on either end of this glass bridge in the Jiuhuangshan Scenic Area seems to make it extra terrifying for many onlookers. Comments include “Really insulted the beauty of this mountain,” “nightmare-inducing,” and “don’t look at me, I’m afraid.”

Hainan Danzhou Hengdahaihua Island Complex

There are so many outlandish structures on this series of three manmade tourist islands that the Ugly Buildings contest organizers couldn’t choose – they just lumped them all together as one big anger-inducing mass. “This is the garbage dump,” wrote one voter. “A game of capital, making a pile of rubbish, what a bad thing to do with this money,” wrote another.

Violin Church, Yanbu, Foshan, Guangdong

This local church isn’t even the only violin-shaped building in China, but locals hate its garishness, its overuse of concrete, its high cost, and the way it has apparently overshadowed more demure adjacent buildings. It was nominated because “the function of the building is extremely unreasonable.” Fair enough.

South Gate of Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University

You might be surprised to learn that this comparatively tame-looking structure has earned the most votes by far. But Chinese voters are annoyed that such a high-cost, high-profile project is both painful to look at and dysfunctional. Apparently, the unnecessarily extravagant gate impedes both vehicular and pedestrian traffic, forcing everyone to stare at it even longer while they’re stuck in the area. “When the design plan came out, the teachers and students in the school objected to the curse,” wrote one voter.

The post China’s Ugliest Buildings Contest Shames the Wasteful and Distasteful first appeared on Dornob.

The Toronto native has designed multiple campaigns to “make the boring problem of plastic pollution more interesting,” including art projects that called attention to straws, cups, and bottles.

“I knew that I needed to level up my projects, but I just needed to find the right partner willing to take a chance on a brand-new big idea first. Lucky for me, the Embassy of Canada in France accepted my proposal to build an art installation to raise awareness for plastics,” said Von Wong on his blog. “This was my chance to create more than a piece of art. It was my chance to create a symbol inviting the world to #TurnOffThePlasticTap.”

To construct his giant garbage spigot, the artist scavenged ventilation ducts from a building about to be demolished. After amassing hundreds of pounds of galvanized steels ducts of various sizes, Von Wong and his team of staff and volunteers cut, painted, and adapted them into a faucet that could fit onto a standard manual forklift. The oversized tap could then be extended into the sky roughly 24 feet in almost any setting where a forklift could drive.

His crew then assembled over 100 used plastic bottles into multiple strands of rope and attached hundreds more discarded plastic containers in configurations that could be easily set up and torn down at each location. The innovative photographer selected five different sites to highlight the seriousness of the plastic crisis: a recycling facility in Montreal where the giant faucet produces more waste than can be processed each day, a container shipping yard, a landfill, a children’s playground, and Canada’s Oka Beach.

“With more than a truckload of plastic flowing into the ocean every 60 seconds, we need to take our heads out of the sand and start looking beyond beach cleanups,” the artist cautions.

In some shots, Von Wong employed models in skin-colored fabrics to pose in the flow of litter, and in others he had his own tiny nephew Kody crawl around in the garbage to illustrate the absurdity of creating so much rubbish and leaving that legacy to the next generation of Earth’s residents.

Each of his photographs with the colossal faucet and its stream of refuse is stunningly and incongruently beautiful. The play of colors against radiant skies and sceneries is so out-of-place with the main action of the picture that it makes the viewer do a double take. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for how we are sometimes blind to the ugly consequences of single-use plastics that are so easy to consume and toss.

The ultimate point of the Turn Off the Plastic Tap project is to get global citizens to realize that we all play a part in the plastic crisis. “Millions of tons of unrecyclable and contaminated plastic waste are exported to poorer countries every year. These countries don’t have the facilities to manage the waste, and it often bleeds straight back into our environment,” Von Wong says, adding that “although it’s hard to do, the best thing we can do is reduce our plastic consumption.”

He is encouraging other artists and creatives to help spread the message by generating a remix of the giant plastic tap and sharing it on his site and social media. All those who participate before November 4th, 2021 will also be entered into a drawing for up to $10,000 worth of prizes.

Images courtesy of Benjamin Von Wong

The post Garbage Spigot in the Sky Calls Attention to Plastic Crisis first appeared on Dornob.

Yasmine started with 16 assembled blocks of stone measuring 16.5 inches on each side, making a single continuous cut into each one to produce two objects, one the negative shape of the other. That means no material was lost in the process of carving the stone into its final form, a dual-purpose table/stool. As you can imagine, that’s not easy to pull off. Less skilled creators might make a far simpler cut to ensure that the two objects were perfectly intact at the end, but Yasmine’s vision is a little more ambitious.

“Flowing Fragments” is inspired by the remnants of Greco-Roman civilization as we view them today, thousands of years later. Once, these architectural fragments were whole and nearly perfect. Now, most of the arches and columns have cracked and fallen so we only see them as parts of each other. But the fragmenting hasn’t necessarily interrupted the beauty of these objects. We can still sense the harmony and rhythm in their proportions and outlines.

With these sculptural objects, Yasmine hopes to remind us all of the importance of our global cultural heritage. “It’s an awareness to save remaining forgotten fragments of previous civilizations in addition to help protect abandoned sites while highlighting on the antiquities trafficking [and] the destruction of authentic and deserted landmarks nowadays when heritage is threatened by urban development,” he says.

Classic shapes and graphic motifs commonly find their way into Yasmine’s work. Another collection, “After Ego,” takes references from Postmodernism, Memphis Design, and Art Deco but distills them to their simplest forms. Each piece was created by drawing layered arches and then rotating and flipping them so they intersect and interact in new ways. “After Ego” is a tribute to Yasmine’s home city of Beirut in the aftermath of the blast that occurred on August 4th, 2020, and the complex mixture of emotions that arose from the tragedy. Made of foam, lightweight concrete plaster, acrylic, and clay, the series represents Yasmine’s quest to communicate these emotions through the use of simple lines.

“As a person filled with imagination, I use my imaginary world as a simulation to try out new ideas and create new objects, and that’s how it all starts,” Yasmine said in an interview with The Artling. “My inspiration comes from everyday life, objects, and emotions. From the human body, its physiology, and its needs. But also from an internal chaos combined with a certain innate sensitivity, sometimes extreme and provocative and not even expected by others but still minimal. I always practice my imagination to create new objects. I never tend to identify the difference between reality and imagination, this is what helps me create intriguing and controversial design objects that are complicated in their production process. However, this is also distinctive in my personality.”

The post Flowing Fragments: Graphic Stone Objects Made of Manufacturing Offcuts first appeared on Dornob.

Founded in 2013 on Bainbridge Island in Washington, U.S. by Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark, the Buy Nothing Project began as a simple way to connect neighbors who wanted to lend or give away items they didn’t need or wanted to share. As the idea began to spread, volunteer-run groups popped up all over, run according to a few universal rules: just freely give stuff away within your immediate neighborhood, with no buying, selling, or bartering involved. There’s no expectation that you provide something in return. Ideally, members of the groups are able to find new homes for items instead of throwing them away or donating them to Goodwill to be resold.

What kind of stuff can you gift or receive via Buy Nothing? Almost anything, as long as it’s legal. Commonly gifted items include furniture, houseplants, clothing, baby supplies, pet supplies, tools, kitchen items, and books. In some communities, certain items are passed around again and again, like decor for a child’s birthday party. Posting an item on your local Buy Nothing platform is also a great way to turn your trash into someone else’s treasure. You never know who might be looking for a bunch of old magazines for collages, a busted vacuum to harvest parts from, broken pottery for mosaics, or worn-out sheets as drop cloths. Items that have seen better days are okay to post as long as you’re up front about their condition.

Need something in particular? You can also post an “ask,” and more than likely, someone in your group will be able to provide the item in question. No need to offer anything in return. You can just say thanks, or show your gratitude by posting a photo of the item in use. You might be surprised just how generous members of Buy Nothing groups can be, offering high dollar items like televisions or even their time and skills. Most groups either gift items with a first-come, first-serve policy, or choose a random number.

Getting stuff for free is awesome, and movements like Buy Nothing can help us all produce a lot less waste. But honestly, the best part of joining your local Buy Nothing group is the insight it will give you into your community, and the connections it’ll allow you to make. Ready to find your local Buy Nothing group? Head to the website to find the closest group to your home. Most Buy Nothing groups are currently hosted on Facebook, but Rockefeller and Clark are currently working on a Buy Nothing app, so soon you won’t need any kind of social media account to join. And if there’s no existing group in your neighborhood, you can always start your own!

The post The Buy Nothing Project: Give, Receive, and Connect with Your Neighbors first appeared on Dornob.

The environmental impact of plastic is well-known. If not recycled, it pollutes our neighborhoods, oceans, and the world around us. With this work, the trio hopes to illustrate how we use and misuse plastic, where it goes, and where it ultimately ends up (most times, in the ocean).

Color coding the trash into categories further emphasizes how humans misuse plastics. The white portion of the sculpture in particular shows that first-use plastics are discarded a whopping 60 percent of the time, whether in landfills, unmanaged in the overall landscape of our planet, or by making its inevitable journey into our oceans.

But that’s not the only data visible on the sculpture. There are also other colors that represent the complicated journey that plastics often take through our global waste stream. For example, green represents recycled plastics, red represents incinerated plastics, and blue shows plastics still in use. The width of each stream is proportionate to its statistical number, but it’s the black stream that’s truly the most alarming here, as it’s meant to reflect all the plastic ever produced since 1950: a whopping 8.3 billion metric tons, all for human use and consumption.

By using plastic collected by 50 volunteers on the Bali beach with the goal of finding the appropriate colors, the creators hoped to shift perspectives. Rather than collecting garbage, they were meant to be collecting and curating the pieces with the goal of taking “creative action.” As artist Liina Klauss (one of the three masterminds behind the project) says, “Science gives us new knowledge about the world. Art gives us new perspectives how to see the world. [And] merging the two has tremendous power.”

Klauss began the vision for the impactful sculpture about ten years ago, in 2011. When she was living in Hong Kong, she gained a deeper understanding of how plastic pollution impacts our planet, and how statement-making art can build awareness. Making Indonesia her second home only served as a catalyst for ultimately producing this colorfully impactful piece on the beach in Bali.

The latest sculpture is just one of the many pieces Klauss has created in the intervening decade, effectively turning “rubbish into rainbows.” On her coastal walks, she has found everything from medical waste to refrigerators washed up on the beach, using all of it in her more than 50 art installations across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan. All are colorful and use the beach as a canvas — the perfect way to illustrate how plastic devastates our coasts, our oceans, and our planet.

Klauss says, “All over the world on remote beaches, plastic pollution has become insane normality or normal insanity.” By creating her sculptures, she hopes to raise awareness and change people’s perceptions — and maybe even their habits. Look for Klauss’ “Perpetual Plastic” on the big screen when it debuts later this year as a short film by director Eric Ebner.

The post Bali’s “Perpetual Plastic” Sculpture is (Literally) Trash first appeared on Dornob.