Ideas for Field Recyling Project, Natural Materials…

This clever new ‘Window Socket’ designed by Kyuho Song & Boa Oh uses solar technology to provide a power point from the sunlight.
So simple and ingenious is this design, that it won the ‘Yanko Design Top 50 Best Designs of 2013’.

The idea of harnessing light has led me to consider a different branch of recycling. Instead of considering the term ‘recycling’ in the sense of taking one solid object, at the end of its lifecycle, being turned into another solid object, I’m going to give consideration to natural things we rely on everyday, and see how they might be reprocessed and reused. The ‘Window Socket’ design above harnesses light, and it could be argued that this is recycling, as the light itself has already served to allow life and light on earth and support photosynthesis.

Another natural resource which I’m considering is water. While the majority of houses have gutters, it seems the water is most often just drained away from the building rather than reclaimed. It is becoming more common practice to reclaim water from sinks and showers for use in toilet cisterns but I still feel more could be done.

I have noticed during my life as a student, living in a more densely populated area than I ever have before, how much waste is produced. The vast majority of this is avoidable. The worst of all is food waste, and I have always found it difficult to understand how people can throw food away, or allow it to go bad. I think I have been lucky to grow up in the countryside with a family vegetable garden, and I’ve seen at first hand the effort it takes to produce good quality and healthy food. I put the vast wastage of food down to the modern culture of fast food and ready-made goods, which conceal the real effort of production, along with the lack of understanding and education about food and ethics. A report here from The Guardian shows that Britons, on average, threw away 24 edible meals per month per household last year, a truly staggering and disgusting amount of waste. I think product design, and a ‘recycling’ based solution may hold some of the answers to improving this issue, and laying down better foundation for future generations.