It is now 100 times more lucrative to mine gold from e-dumps than from the ground. Yet 70 years ago, we barely threw anything away at all. Can design change our disposable culture?
How will this age be remembered? After the stone age, the bronze age, the steam age and the information age, what material or innovation will most define the current era? According to a new exhibition at the Design Museum, the most ubiquitous hallmark of the Anthropocene is not a gamechanging material, nor the mastery of technology. It’s trash.
“We are arguably living in the waste age,” says Justin McGuirk, the London museum’s chief curator, who has spent the last three years rifling through rubbish with co-curator Gemma Curtin to put together this timely show. “The production of waste is absolutely central to our way of life, a fundamental part of how the global economy operates. We wanted to show how design is deeply complicit in the waste problem – and also best placed to address it.”
Opening on the eve of the Cop26 climate summit, Waste Age is a powerful wake-up call, not so much to consumers, but to the manufacturers, retailers and, most crucially, government regulators. It is not intended to be a slap around the face for buying that takeaway coffee on your way to the museum, or forgetting your cotton tote bag yet again, but an eye-opening look at the sheer scale of the issue, and the people working on ingenious solutions.
The exhibition begins with a useful reminder that we didn’t get here by accident. Humans are not inherently wasteful creatures. Throwaway culture was something we had to learn – indeed, it was a lifestyle choice, marketed from the mid-20th century onwards as a decadent release, following the austerity of wartime. It was the intentional opposite of “make do and mend”. One advert from the 1960s extolls the wonders of the new-fangled polystyrene cup: “New and very in! The party ‘glass’ you just enjoy … and throw away.” It hangs next to a plastic carrier bag from the 1980s, printed with descriptions of its many advantages over paper. Little did we know that, four decades later, the world would be consuming more than a million plastic bags a minute.
Generating waste, the curators argue, has long been a primary engine of the economy. The history of the lightbulb is an illuminating case in point. In the 1920s, bulbs were so long-lasting that they were deemed commercially unviable. General Electric, Philips and others formed the Phoebus cartel in 1924 to standardise the life expectancy of lightbulbs at 1,000 hours – down from the previous 2,500 hours. And so the culture of planned obsolescence was born. Almost a century later, similar practices continue: last year Apple agreed to pay up to $500m, after it was accused of deliberately slowing down older phone models to encourage consumers to buy the latest handsets.
Continue reading...source https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/nov/01/waste-age-exhibition-design-museum
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