REculture: A post consumption economy

Repair, reuse, repurpose, recycle ~ exploring the informal businesses at the BoP 

Scraps into gold

In a backward slum on the outskirts of Kanpur, these muslim women receive design and product development training in making useful items out of scraps of leather. They come from a community that has historically worked in the leather industry and used to earn a pittance making riding whips from scraps for a rupee or two a piece. Now, they receive Rs 50 a day during training and a designer was brought in from New Delhi to help them develop better products for sale and export. Their husbands work in tanneries and they use this extra income to educate their daughters and invest in their families.

All photos taken by the author in September 2009.

       
Click here to download:
Scraps_into_gold.zip (3528 KB)

Posted by Niti Bhan 

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Spatial Maximisation

The Practice of Everyday Design is a Canadian partnership focusing on art, product design and architecture which seeks design opportunities from the merging of seemingly irreconcilable ideas. Their piece The Mobile Office is constructed of materials discarded within a one block radius of the installation's site. The layout maximises space while allowing for flexibility.

Spatial and material maximisation is commonly seen in informal economies at the base of the pyramid. Yesterday I watched a garland maker peacefully proceed with his craft from a miniscule work environment below the stall which sold his products alongside small goods.

 

Filed under  //   architecture   art   canada   india   repurpose   spatial   upcycle  
Posted by Meena Kadri 

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Tracing the informal waste chain visually

 Two girls play with some granulated polystyrene that dropped accidentally--a moment of levity in an uncommon playground

Two girls play with some granulated polystyrene that dropped accidentally--a moment of levity in an uncommon playground


Via LiveMint

With the aid of the NGO Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, Enrico Fabian, a German photographer, spent three months following the kabaris from the moment they pick up trash from New Delhi’s homes, through the mounds of trash at the Ghazipur landfill site, to the recycling plants on the outskirts of the city. Here’s a glimpse into one of the most arduous but unrewarding jobs in Delhi.

More pictures by Enrico Fabian

• Powerful machines compress most metal trash into cubes, which are then transported to a recycling plant and turned into appliances and construction beams.

• A waste pickerworking at a metal segregation complex in Seemapuri, in the city’s north-east, carries a tangle of wires on his head.

• An avalanche of wastepours from a dump truck. The waste pickers stand as close as possible to get the best of the lot first.

• A young ragpickerignores the risk of landslides as he goes about earning his daily bread on the slopes of a landfill.

Posted by Niti Bhan 

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ReCommerce: Kashless, because you're broke

From the company's website, via Bruce Sterling on Twitter

Kashless, Inc. is a software developer creating solutions to enable reuse and recycling marketplaces.  Consumers can experience our software solutions over at Kashless.org which is the first marketplace where everything is free. 

We believe reuse and recycling marketplaces should be as rich in advanced ecommerce and community features as the best paid goods marketplaces. No more clumsy bulletin boards or e-mail group lists.  An advanced, modern ecommerce platform for reuse that is environmentally aware.  We call it ReCommerce.  By providing a comprehensive platform for reuse, Kashless extends the useful life of products, diverts significant amount of items from the waste stream, and reduces raw material resource demand.  The platform quantifies the benefits of ReUse (carbon, GHG, tons of waste, etc.) so that brands, municipalities,organizations and individuals can demonstrate the value to stakeholders. Kashless, Inc. operates a demonstration ReCommerce reuse portal at kashless.org, white label versions of the platform in SAAS model, and a suite of web services that enable ReCommerce. Kashless provides a superior ReCommerce marketplace for the existing buyers/sellers in the market as well as a platform for extending the reach of ReCommerce into social networks, search engines, communities and other ecommerce marketplaces.

From here you can catch up on the Kashless Journey through our Detailed Saga blog (a couple recent entries are over on the right), find out About us, get acquainted with Frequently Asked Questions, take a gander at careers over at Jobs, check out our Team, TALK about the issues (as well as user support forums), give us FeedbackContact the Kashless Krew, or subscribe to our blog in your news reader.  

Give well, Get more, Repeat

Set your stuff FREE!

Thanks for coming and welcome!

Posted by Niti Bhan 

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Brazil: Raising the dignity of wastepickers

Full article available here at IPSNews

More than 1,500 representatives of waste recyclers from 13 countries, and thousands of other visitors, including the host country Brazil's left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met last week in São Paulo, demonstrating that they are no longer pariahs in our throw-away society.

"Today I feel proud of being a 'catadora' (garbage sorter), although there is still prejudice against this kind of work," Lilian Nascimento, a member of the Brazilian National Movement of Recyclable Materials Collectors and part of the team that organised the international event, titled "Reviravolta Expocatadores 2009", told IPS.

The Oct 28-30 event, bringing together the Latin American Recyclers' Network, was an opportunity for dialogue with governments, businesses and social organisations, and for exhibiting projects, technologies and private sector initiatives aimed at improving street collection of reusable waste.

The Portuguese term "reviravolta" means to overturn, or a swift and drastic transformation, and "catadores" is the local Brazilian term for garbage sorters. "Catar" is to collect, in the sense of selecting items one by one from the ground.

"'Catador' is a good name and should be kept as the general term in Latin America," but "recycler" has emerged as the common identifier as it is more formal and "is in harmony with current environmental issues and the climate crisis," said Marisol Álvarez, a member of the Chilean delegation who came in the company of two of her colleagues and two technical staff from non-governmental organisations.

Expocatadores 2009 is the first such meeting of its size, promoted by the Brazilian movement and the Latin American Network.

Lula announced that the state development bank would open a line of credit for recyclers' cooperatives to purchase electric vehicles, made by Itaipú, the company that runs the hydroelectric power station shared between Brazil and Paraguay. He said the "catadores" would be exempt from vehicle registration fees.

Cities Minister Marcio Fortes, who was with Lula's entourage, talked about the resources his ministry devotes to infrastructure for recyclers' cooperatives, especially warehouses for separating the materials they collect.

"The pride of the recyclers" in organising such a huge event, and their "capacity to autonomously engage the federal government, ministers, development banks, public and private companies and foundations, is the most powerful and important achievement of this event," said Valdemar de Oliveira, head of institutional relations for the Avina Foundation, which sponsored Expocatadores 2009.

Posted by Niti Bhan 

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Cycles to Support Slum Livelihoods in Kenya

Worldbike, in collaboration with UN-HABITAT and a local youth group, is using customised bicycles to explore rubbish-handling enterprises in some of Kenya's most impoverished neighbourhoods. Worldbike is a non-profit that designs, distributes and promotes bicycles as an alleviator of development challenges.

Andrew Hall, Worldbike's project manager in Kenya, describes their goals as 'income generation, livelihood creation and essential service provision, but usually in the model they go hand in hand'...

To accomplish this, they're developing sustainable solid waste management businesses for and in partnership with poor communities. 'People need solid waste management. That's an essential service,' Hall says. 'But we also want to do it in a way that creates livelihoods.'

In turn, the businesses act as incubators, live experiments in which Worldbike can use its expertise in non-motorized transport to customize everything from bicycles and handcarts to business models and community relationships.

'Worldbike wants to scale its impacts,' he says. 'If you want to have big impacts, then you need to come up with a model that is going to be reproducible to a level that impacts a lot of people's lives.' Piloting their work here at a small scale allows them to invest in a more holistic design phase, working closely with communities to assess their needs and develop solutions to problems as they arise.

Read more on The Ecologist and at Worldbike.

Filed under  //   africa   bicycle   business model   collection   kenya   system  
Posted by Meena Kadri 

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Upcycling Packaging in the Developed World

Terracycle is a company that burst onto the public radar in the US last year, producing packaging for a range of products from lightly recycled consumer product packaging—a first world version of the upcycling of bulk food bags, metals cans,  etc. into clothing or pacjaging one sees in underdeveloped markets. Rather than obscure the source material within a new end product, Terracycle engages its customers to collect specific products, such as juice drink pouches, soda bottles, yogurt pots, snack packaging to create things like garden fertilizer containers, backpacks, stereo speakers, and school folders, seen here. The company is very open about recruiting "foot soldiers" to collect specific waste and turn it in to collection centers, and at the time of writing, said it has collected 1,240,905,368 units of waste for upcycling.

Posted by Scott Smith 

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Circulate

A former student of mine, Sagarika Sundaram, proposed this piece of modular furniture created from recycled newspapers sometime back.

"Embrace the economic life by taking a seat on CIRCULATE. Use this block of newspaper as a stool in your kitchen, garage or party. Join four of them together to make a bigger table. This stylish piece of furniture is modular, use it in units to create furniture that suits your need anytime, anywhere." 

Her original piece was made from 50 rupees worth of newspapers (50 Rupees = 1.25 USD/0.60 GBP/0.88 EUR). I'm thinking it would be interesting to see the various heights of stools created from 50 units of the national currency of various countries. And even more significant to consider  the relative costs/value of recycling that paper back into the circulation chain of paper goods in respective countries – via both formal and informal channels.

Filed under  //   global   local   paper   recycle   repurpose  
Posted by Meena Kadri 

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Formal Economy Begins to Squeeze the Informal in China

     
Click here to download:
Formal_Economy_Begins_to_Squee.zip (377 KB)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cssmith/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A few years ago on a research trip to China I was almost run down by a bike-based scrap merchant on his way across Beijing. At first I was staggered by this one man's ambition carrying such a large load, then I began to see more and more of these scrap collectors across the city, picking up bits of the hutongs Beijing's government were eliminating in advance of the Olympic Games, or gathering refuse, packing material or even not-yet-used bits from the many worksites spread across the megacity.

According to the People's Daily in a 2007 article, there were an estimated 10 million scrap collectors in the country, but that year a move was made to license them, which was seen by some as a way for formal companies to squeeze out the informal economy as China's recycling economy grew. As the country becomes more focused on resource management, in particular managing e-waste, this trend toward formalization/legalization of the recycle/reuse sector is likely to grow. This is likely to have a detrimental impact on China's emerging class of electronics recyclers, as well as traditional scrap merchants relying on money from extracted metals and other components.

Filed under  //   bicycle   China   informal   recycle  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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Mumbai Mash-up of Formal + Informal

At Mumbai's Bhaji Gulli I noted the proximity of the formal and the informal within the clamorous and colourful produce market.

Street-side stalls sell a myriad of fruits, vegetables, pulses and grains but are ever-mindful of the local authority's road markings which indicate where pedestrian customers (and occasional vehicles) should pass freely.

One wonders if the street stalls would self-govern around such an enabling indicator – which enhances the shopper's experience – if the formality were absent?

Filed under  //   formal   india   informal   market   mumbai  
Posted by Meena Kadri 

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