THE STORY OF BOTTLED WATER &THE STORY OF COSMETICS

I quite like the visual communication of this series of videos: simple but clear, and interesting. I feel so embarrassed that I just bought a bottle of water before watching the story of bottled water. To be honest, I do not rely on bottled water in my daily life, most of the time I choose tap. I think most people, we sometimes choose to buy bottled water due to it is convenient to get. Although I always complain the price of bottled water, I still trust it may be worth that money. I know that not every brand of bottled water use water comes from mountains streams and pristine nature, I still trust it is clean, health and has minerals in it. But the truth makes me so disappointed. It’s really hard to believe that a third of all bottled water comes from tap! I feel so frustrated that I spent a lot on these expensive but worthless, low-cost products.

In China, tap water is not that clean enough people can drink directly from it. We usually boil first. You can imagine how inconvenient in summer, hot water takes a long time to cool down. Due to this reason, most families have water dispenser at home. Few years ago, it costs only 10 RMB to get water bucket changed. They are cheap and clean, so we consume a lot large bottles of water during summer time which are trashing the environment all along the product’s life cycle. We known that real recycling would turn bottles back into bottles, but I would never trust before watching this video that 80% of bottles end up in landfills, where they will sit for thousands of years, or burned in incinerators which can release toxic pollution.

The story of cosmetics is more focus on product safety. We rely on cosmetics every day, especially for ladies. I can’t imagine if they all contain toxic chemicals, how badly would they affect our health? Do we need to worry about cancer or other problems every time we use cosmetics? But we really need them. Face cream, shampoo…these basic cosmetics have already became part of our life. What is more terrible is that on cosmetics labels, words like “herbal”, “natural”, even “organic” have no legal definition. That means anybody can put anything in a bottle and call it natural. I really don’t know what product brand can I trust? What products can I buy? Why the current situation is like this? Profit?! That’s ridiculous. Isn’t health the most important? I trust life can be better without toxics in, toxics out.

The bottled water and cosmetics can be considered as counterexamples. They are irresponsible for the others, for the society, for the environment. ‘Sustainable’ is the key word in recent design and manufacturing field. As an industrial designer, we really need to consider the sustainable development in our design through choosing sustainable materials and thinking about the product life cycle, the manufacturing process and product end of life. We should design for environmental sustainability, socio-ethical sustainability. And we should transfer this sustainable development consciousness to everyone around us.

RECYCLING

It is easy to associate our fast growing standard of living with the huge amount of products, the huge amount of packaging used in our daily life. If we make statistical investigation and analysis of the amount of packaging, materials, resources used for our daily production, the result can be amazing. We’ve already got a similar experience through ecological footprint.

The main theme of these videos is to give packaging a new life through converting packaging waste to new products. In simple words, they are all about recycling. From these 7 videos, I learned not only the different processed of materials being recycled, but also some thinking about how to use materials more efficiently and minimize the waste. As a designer, our design should always keep with issues of current situation. Environment issues are hot topics in recent years. If we ignore these issues, our design will never be acknowledged by the society.

The processes of materials being recycled are quite similar. On the whole, it can be concluded to the process of sort – clean – combine – create new. Plastic is separated according to what kind of plastic the packaging is manufactured from which include PE, PP, PET, and PS… New products from waste plastic include pipes and children’s toys. Glass is sorted according to colors. Fragments which are smaller than 15mm can be sorted correctly and on the basis of light absorbed, computer can determine what has to be removed. Waste glass can make new bottles through blowing. Paper is sorted according to paper quality while impurities and printing are removed. Cardboard box, newspaper can be produced from waste paper. Tissue, toilet rolls also contain high proportion of waste paper between 60% and 70%. A can that is return to the production loop can be recycled without any quality losses. Examples of recycling from waste tin include railway and car body. Manufacture aluminum sheets which can be printed as packaging require only 1/20 of the energy otherwise needed for the production of new goods and production waste will return to production loop for the next production. For beverage cartons, Plastic and aluminum separate from cardboard, the paper fraction is removed and process to premium waste paper. The remaining of plastic and aluminum are subsequently used in cement production.

Before watching these videos, I’ve already got an opinion that we should combine our design with our environment. We should always think how can we use minimum material to make a product and is there exists any alternative choices of new materials? There are many ways to satisfy customers through our design; the hardest thing is to choose the best,

Luckily, we see people pay more and more attention to protect our environment, to save resources, to recycling and there are more and more ecodesigners. As an industrial designer, we are important to translate our learning to materials and environment to people around us through our product.