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.

PROJECT 3, PEER COMMENTS

Nielsen, Chelcie
Taouk, Danielle
Chow, Julian
Darmawan, Stanley
El Khouri, Valerie

Upcycling Unwanteds

Materials used for this product:
plastic bags
Cardboard
Leather belts
Cloth
One biscuit can


Did you know?
The plastic bag is an accepted part of Australia’s shopping culture, but it shouldn’t be. Each year we use 3.92 billion new plastic shopping bags, many of which remain in the environment.

_ The average Australian household uses 502 plastic shopping bags every year.
_ Australians dump 7,150 recyclable plastic bags into landfill every minute or 429,000 every hour.
_ It takes 21,540 tonnes of plastic to produce 3.92 billion plastics bags.
_ If 3.92 billion plastic bags were tied together, they would circle the globe 24 times.
_ Plastic shopping bags can be returned to your supermarket for recycling. Currently only approximately 3% of bags are being recycled.

Impact of plastic bags on the environment:
Natural resources
Persistence in the environment
Litter
Clean up costs
Marine life
Landfills
Greenhouse gases

The main purpose of this product is to give a coat to an original biscuit can and make it much more like a vase and can help to slove the problems related to plastic bags.

The weaving part of this vase is totally handmade. It can really add traditional elements to this product and makes this product friendly. The biscuit can inside it is for containing water and when you need to change water, you can take the can off from its ‘cloth’.

Richard Seymour + Dick Powell: Designing dream machines

The video gives me a main idea of how an industrial design company works and the stress of communication makes me to realize the significance of communication.

Not only the communication among our fellow designers is necessary, but also our target market, which means we should always communicate to our fellows to develop our ideas and then communicate our developed ideas to our clients to have a check of whether our ideas can meet the need of our clients or target market to the maximum. Visual communication is also important, we should always combine our hand drawing and computer modeling to better express our ideas.

As an industrial designer, communication can improve our ideas, improve our personal skill, satisfy our target market to the maximum, and attract more clients. I think without communication, our product may like a ‘dead’ thing.

STORY OF STUFF -- ANNIE

Annie Leonard makes some great points about the untenability of running our linear "materials economy" system on our finite planet, and she offers a little hope and a somewhat scattershot sense of direction at the end of her lecture.

The text book says “stuff move through a system: extraction – production – distribution – consumption – disposal.”

Annie spent 10 years travelling the world, tracking where are all the stuff come from and where the go and find what the text book says in not the whole story.

Here are my impressions on each aspect in The Story of Stuff:

EXTRACTION: She mentioned resources are limit to us and we are running out of resources. “Only 4% forest left in the USA, the USA is 5% of global population, but uses 30% of resources.”

PRODUCTION: Annie said “toxic in, toxic out” which means toxic produced in industrial production can result in toxic in home which is quite harmful to our body. Then Annie Leonard raised the freak-out level: We dip our pillows in BFR (brominated flame retardants), a horribly toxic man-made chemical, and we sleep on them! Now, The Story of Stuff said that women in the USA (and Canada, which the video didn’t mention) have the highest amounts of BFAs in their breast milk, compared to other countries.

DISTRIBUTION: A $4.99 radio – how is it so cheap? So many parts and processes to make the radio MUST cost much more than $4.99! What are the true costs of production?

CONSUMPTION: SHOP! We can always keep using 1% of our products and 99% will be trash. More consumer goods leads to less health care, less education, less safe transportation, less sustainability, less justice… People feel like they are in a circle that they always feel the products they currently have are bad and they need to buy some new products after watching so many advertisements on TV, then they go back work, trying to earn more money and go back shopping and watch TV again. I do feel like it is a true phenomenon, I just how silly we are we waste our time and do such a useless thing.

DISPOSAL: We burned some trash or did land fill which lead to the changing of our climate and we had created super toxic at the same time which is dioxin. Recycling is one way to protect the environment, but not enough.

After watching this video, I do realize the relationship between our products and our environment or the relationship between our products and us. In such a rapid developing era, technology is important, pollution is avoidable, but this is not an excuse. We should develop our economy build on how we can do best to protect our environment. Just as what Annie said in her video “people create it, we are people too.” People are smart, but I think we are over smart on this issue, that will be silly. Resources are limited; people’s health is the most important. Without people, money means nothing. Without resources, we will have few materials can be used to produce. If we choose to destroy the relationship between the environment and us and if we always choose to put profit at the first position, do not care people’s health. We must have to face the consequence one day. Everyone has the responsibility.

ASSIGNMENT2 PEER COMMENTS

Arezzi, Guida
Soares, Emily
Walker, Nicholas
Li, Xiao Ling (Susanna)
Lee, Fiona