Picture: Baltimore City

The Inner Harbor Water Wheel collects trash and debris at the outfall of the Jones Falls River, intercepting it before it enters Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Since it began operating, in May 2014, the water wheel has removed over 250 tons of trash from Baltimore’s waterways.

The machine funnels debris using two long booms and lifts it onto a wide conveyor belt. The refuse is then deposited in a dumpster on a separate platform. The wheel powers a conveyor, which lifts the trash from the river. When the current isn’t going quickly enough, the solar-powered pumps below the wheel push up water and get it spinning again.

The water wheel is part of the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative, which aims to restore Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, making it swimmable by 2020. A second wheel is being crowdfunded.

See & read more:  1 / 2 / 3 / 4. Thanks to Tim Joye.

Related: Boat Mills

“In São Paulo, the vast majority of recycling is done by individuals called catadores. They collect discarded drink cans in their carts to recycle for money to help support themselves. London-based Studio Swine took to the streets to create a project that would help catadores get much more money for their work.

The duo behind Studio Swine made an improvised mobile foundry to smelt the aluminum from the cans. They then pressed locally-found objects into sand found at a nearby construction site to make molds. After pouring the liquid aluminum into the molds, the team had created interestingly-shaped stool seats. Each stool requires around 60 cans to produce. This may sound like a lot, but a catadore can collect thousands of cans in one workday.”

See & read more: Mobile foundry gives recyclers a creative income stream.

With L’Increvable you change each component when needed. You don’t have to be a handy(wo)man: the Increvable website guides you through each component maintenance thanks to well-documented tutorials and each new component is delivered with proper tools.

You buy the washing machine in flat-pack form and then you assemble it yourself : it gives you the opportunity to get to know the machine. The traditional 30 kg (60 lbs) of cement ballast are replaced by a water tank. The latter is automatically filled during the first use of the machine. This means that the machine can be made lighter again when it needs to be moved.

By removing all highly technical and hardly replaceable parts from the structure and built with such specifications from the ground up, the Increvable is destined to be easily manipulable by the mere user. The missing technologic parts (i.e. touchable screen) do change the User Experience in a very fundamental way, giving maybe to some of us a certain old school feel to the tech but adds several dozens of years before obsolescence as a result.”

See & read more: 1 / 2 / 3. Thanks to Christopher Santerre.

Almost a quarter of a million windmills worldwide will need to be replaced by 2030. The rotor blades are made of valuable composite materials that are difficult to recover at the end of their energy generating life. New generation rotor blades made of glass or carbon fibre composite material have average lifespans of between 10 and 25 years. Recycling of glass fibre composite is possible though complex. Recycling of the more highly valued carbon fibre composite is currently impossible. In many EU countries landfill of carbon composites is now prohibited. Thus, many rotor blades at the end of their wind turbine life are currently shredded and incinerated. At current growth rates, by 2034, there will be about 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually, worldwide.

The Dutch firm Superuse Studios has found a solution to the growing mountains of waste generated by the wind industry: making use of end-of-life rotor blades in design and architecture. The realised projects demonstrate the technical applications and potential for blade made designs and architecture. In their second life as design and architectural elements, rotor blades could be used for a further 50-100 years, or more. Blade made designs are durable, iconic, compete economically, and reduce the ecological footprint of projects in which they are used.

REwind Willemsplein

Public seating made from rotor blades was designed and installed for the Rotterdam municipality. The REwind public seating is located at Willemsplein, a public square at the foot of the well-known Erasmus bridge. The municipality was in need of durable, indestructible seating with iconic quality for people waiting to board harbour tour boats, but which could also be temporarily removed, when necessary, to make room for public events. Nine rotor blades from Friesland destined for incineration were used.

Public seating in Rotterdam. Picture by Denis Guzzo. More pictures.

Five blades were used for seating, three as backrests, and one as place marker. By adjusting the angles and positions of the blades ergonomic public seating with a diversity of seating options was created. Seating depths vary from 30 to 80 cm, providing upright seating to more relaxed lounging options. The 6 metre long blades are attached with bolts to 1m3 concrete aggregate blocks made heavy enough to keep the lightweight blades in place. The aggregate is 100% recycled concrete rubble from Rotterdam.

Wikado Playground

The first Wikado built at the Meidoorn playground at Oude Noorden, Rotterdam, was built for the same budget as a comparable standard playground, and has an ecological footprint fifty times smaller. The playground was designed to maximise imaginative play, social interaction, and children driven game development. The inherent properties of rotor blades make this material an excellent choice: weather and wind resistant, organic, ergonomic shapes, and a strong and rigid structure. The cylindrical portion of 30 m long blades has a diameter of 1.4 m and makes for interior play spaces. One of the five 30 m blades was used intact. The remaining four blades were cut into three sections.

Playground in Rotterdam. Picture by Denis Guzzo. More pictures.

The four cylindrical end sections were transformed into play towers that stand around the central play zone. Each tower has a distinct and recognizable character. The ‘towerflat’ has three rooms with peeking holes, the ‘watchtower’ with a former F16 cockpit on top, the ‘water tower’ with hand pump for children to pump water for mixing with sand, and the ‘slide tower’ to which the original slippery sides from the site are attached.

REwind Almere

Construction is underway of the Superuse Studios’ designed shelters for the thousands of daily commuters to use the bus-train transfer station at Almere Poort. The durable and indestructible shelter design uses four 30m rotor blades. Waste rotor blades are easy to find in Almere, Holland’s #1 wind-energy region. Stacked in a Stonehenge like manner two 30 m blades are used to create a large shelter. Two of these large shelters are being built. The changing shape over the length of the blades gives a shelter roof that morphs into different shapes depending on the angle from which is it is viewed.

A bus shelter made from rotor blades. Source: Blade Made, Superuse Studios.

Every part of the blade is used. The blades were cut in four sections to harness the different inherent qualities along the length of the blade. This gives construction pieces that are essentitally readymade for different construction purposes. The strongest and heaviest part (former connection to the wind turbine axial) is used as roof supporting columns, and the widest part of the blade for the roof. The tip of the blade is used for the long seating bench, and the circular end pieces are used for large planting pots placed around the site. Completion is expected by the end of March 2014.

Future Plans

Superuse Studios has been invited to partner with the Danish ‘Genvind Consortium‘,  a consortium of over 20 organisations, including Vestas, the biggest wind turbine producer of the world. The main goal of this consortium is to find solutions to the growing mountains of waste generated by the wind industry. Superuse Studios have joined the Genvind project to demonstrate how worldwide blade made projects that reuse wind rotor blades can play an important role in the processing of this composite material. The collaboration already resulted in very concrete plans for a blade made bridge in Denmark.

Thanks to Tim Joye.

Livestock at waste management park in Bobbili, India

Lowly as it may seem, Bobbili prides itself on its zero-waste zone with a comprehensive recycling system that ensures nothing goes to the landfill. Their unique solution involves door-to-door collection of household waste strictly separated as dry and wet, and the 2010 ban on plastic. The spotlight of the scheme is the Municipal Solid Waste Park – a 8.5-acre site comprising a bio-compost yard handling 2.5 to 3 tonnes of organic waste a day. The most innovative part is the utilisation of livestock.

A 2012 report by India’s Regional Centre for Urban and Environmental Studies states that “animals are the part of the solution, not the problem. The livestock’s potential contribution in solving environmental problems is equally large. The livestock contribute to tackle our environmental degradation by a variety of ways.”

By 2012 the park kept 4 chickens, 21 ducks, 6 pigs and other animals for different functions. Chickens are benefited from the insects in the waste, whilst pigs would gulp the food waste collected from hotels. Ducks take care of the leftovers collected from the fish market. Dogs are in charge of domestic leftovers. The ‘park farm’ is probably the first in the world to implement animal feed on a municipal level.

Solid Waste Management Park in Bobbili, India

The animal farm takes its inspiration from the history of feeding animals with organic waste. Dogs, especially domesticated ones, are effective in taking care of meat scraps. As a common practice in traditional pig farming, pigs often consume the leftovers, rather than energy and cost-intensive crops. Ducks and chickens respectively favour kitchen scraps and milling by-products. Given the extraordinary effectiveness of earthworms to decompose vegetable and food wastes, vermicompost is another key of this living waste management system.

Besides the fact that landfill relief means avoided methane emission, animal waste can be a sustainable source of natural fertiliser whose cost and carbon footprint are way lower than artificial ones. More importantly, because the system doesn’t involve complex technologies, it can be easilly implemented – though in a smaller scale – on household levels. Just by keeping dogs and resuming the tradition of backyard chicken, we can easily reduce kitchen scraps and contribute to a significant cut in food waste.

This is a guest post by Ren Wan, a writer and sustainability advocate who is based in Hong Kong. She runs JupYeah, an online swapping platform, is a managing editor for WestEast Magazine, and blogs at Loccomama. Ren previously wrote about Furoshiki, a square cloth that with different wrapping techniques can basically transport anything.

Click to enlarge. More pictures here.

Modern bags might have outshone Furoshiki, but recent years have seen its comeback as a green alternative to shopping bags, thanks to the ‘Mottainai Furoshiki’ initiative by Yuriko Koike, Japan’s Minister of the Environment, in 2006. “It’s a shame for something to go to waste without having made use of its potential in full,” said Koike. Like what beauty label LUSH has followed to produce, the modern Furoshiki Koike upheld was made of recycled PET bottles that, as the Minister put it, “can wrap almost anything in it regardless of size or shape with a little ingenuity by simply folding it in a right way.”

The above graph demonstrating different wrapping techniques went viral on the internet. A wave of shops emerged to sell fancy furoshiki. The Minister’s statement holds some truism because a furoshiki does wrap up almost anything of all shapes and fragility – from vegetables to bottles, from wine glasses to eggs, from a baby to a dog. Besides its diversity, Furoshiki is a great alternative to adopt also because of its portability, leaving almost no room for excuses like ‘I forgot to bring my own bag’. Most of the time very decorative because Japanese treat it as an artistic craft, a furoshiki makes a great scarf, headband or pocket square.

Light and small, it comfortably fits in your pocket or day bag, whilst some furoshiki clothes are big enough to a bag whose form you can change every other day. A personal experiment proves that it helps encourage shoppers to opt for less- or un-packaged options. To avoid unnecessary packaging I visit local grocery stores for unpackaged tomatoes and to the plastic bag addicts’ surprise, it is very easy and light to transport. Just think about how one piece of cloth has the potential to replace all shopping bags. Does it not make it one of the smartest solution to shopping bags and excessive packaging?

This is a guest post by Ren Wan, a writer and sustainability advocate who is based in Hong Kong. She runs JupYeah, an online swapping platform, is a managing editor for WestEast Magazine, and blogs at Loccomama.

Today’s cars look like spaceships and are built by robots in futuristic factories. At least, that’s the picture in the developed world.

In Ghana, West Africa, both the cars and the auto industry look rather different. In a neighbourhood called Suame Magazine, an estimated 200,000 artisans take apart discarded western cars and use the parts to build easily repairable vehicles that are suitable for African roads. All this happens manually and in open air.

Artist Melle Smets and researcher Joost van Onna, both from the Netherlands, set up shop in Suame Magazine and built a unique African concept car in collaboration with the local community: the SMATI Turtle 1. Their project calls into question western ways of dealing with technology, waste, employment and automation.

Picture: The SMATI Turtle 1

Large cargo ships bring thousands of used cars from Europe to the African markets every week. In Ghana, these vehicles are transported from Tema harbour to Suame Magazine, 10 km north of Kumasi, to get a total makeover. Originating in the 1920s when blacksmiths started to shift their attention from carriages to cars, Suame Magazine now employs an estimated 200,000 artisans in 12,000 enterprises.

It is a self-organizing system capable of building almost anything using car parts; fences, swings, water pumps, carbide compressors, welding machines, but most of all vehicles adapted to the African market. Everything is recycled. Even the unrepairable car parts have a destination: the blast furnace, which melts broken engine blocks into new iron products.

Suame Magazine might look chaotic to Western eyes but all the same it produces cars. Better cars, in a sense. Western automobiles have become so sophisticated that once they break down you cannot repair them yourself.

Stripped to the Bone

In Suame Magazine, first the cars are stripped to the bone. Secondly, all computerized devices are thrown out. A sustainable African car has to be mechanical. When the car is stripped the construction process can begin. The result is a strong and simple car ready to carry heavy loads, with extra cargo space, a mechanical motor, a stronger chassis, stronger rims and iron springs. African roads demand very strong cars. The European cars are too weak.

The SMATI Turtle 1

Melle Smets and Joost van Onna traveled to Kumasi in February 2013 to build an African concept car in collaboration with the local artisanal community. The vehicle, which is called the SMATI Turtle 1, was built according to the motto “Let’s make things simple”, and satisfied the following criteria:

• it was entirely built in Suame Magazine from locally crafted, refurbished and used parts from different brands of discarded cars;
• it is robust and easy to assemble, re-assemble and repair;
• it is a prototype of a car potentially fit for the African market;
• it provides the driver and passengers with a superb experience of the landscape when driven;
• it was built in a time frame of just 12 weeks.

The completed car made a test drive through Ghana, and was inaugurated by the Ashanti king. The SMATI Turtle 1 was then exported to the Netherlands. In this way, discarded car parts which were once exported to Ghana were sent back to where they came from in the shape of a unique automobile. Smets and van Onna have made a website and a video about the SMATI Turtle 1, which was the source material for this post.

The car will be presented at the international IMPAKT festival in Utrecht (the Netherlands) from October 30 to November 3, 2013. This year’s festival theme is “Capitalism Catch 22”. I will be one of the speakers at the IMPAKT festival, so I hope to tell you more about the vehicle in two weeks.

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• Is Cuba the first large-scale maker society?
• When low-tech goes IKEA
• How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware
• More low-tech cars

“Our mattress is worn out. We need a new one, but I’ve been dreading buying a new one. I don’t like the waste of it all: The ignoble dragging of the old mattress to the curb. The prospect of sleeping on a brand new construct of toxic foam and fire retardants… In Greece, Italy and France mattresses are made by local craftsmen, and are stuffed with 100% wool. These mattresses basically last for life. When the wool gets compressed the mattress guys will empty it out, fluff it up, and re-stuff it, adding more wool if necessary.” [1]

“The bed Mary bought was made by Signor Oldani, a Milanese bed-maker and upholsterer. He made beds the Italian way, and the way we used to make mattresses in England before the introduction of short-lived internally sprung ones.

The beauty of the mattress is that when it needs a wash, the wool can be pulled out, stuffed, in batches, into pillow cases, put through the washing machine and after drying, carded back into fluffy pile before being returned to the mattress cover.

Every few years, it needs to be re-carded, as the wool slowly compacts, says Mary. In Italy during the summer, the mattress man, il cardatore, tours Italian homes, pulls out the wool from their mattresses, re-cards it, adds some more, as the process reduces the stuffing a bit, rebuttons and then sews the mattress cover back up again. Mary submitted her mattress to this process four times.” [2]

“Totally by chance, I found two places in Paris that still make their own 100% wool mattresses by hand… It was ready two days later. They told me to come back in 10 years to have the mattress redone: they pick it up in the morning, take out the wool stuffing, clean and refluff it, put a new cover on it, and then deliver it back to you before bedtime.” [3]

Read more: 1 / 2 / 3. Via Root Simple.

“The particles pass a magnet that extracts ferrous metal particles. The particles then flow over a small eddy current rotor, which is positioned underneath the grinding wheel and powered by a 3:1 gear ratio with the bicycle chain. The changing magnetic fields of the eddy current rotor repulse conducting metal, but have no effect on non-metals; the metal particles are projected horizontally while the nonmetals fall vertically, separating particles in the bottom collection tray. The bicyclean requires a single operator.”

Read more: Bicyclean. Via Co.EXIST.

“There is a huge need for construction materials, at the same time the planet everywhere is littered by millions of used car tires. A way has to be found for re-using the materials that car tires are made of: rubber and steel. Large scale processes for this are well known. At the smallest scale of use better methods of recuperation have to be developed.”

“Each car tire contains 70 meters of steel wire with a 1 mm cross section. When the properties of the composing parts of a used rubber tire are well understood, then the practice of recuperation can be adapted to it.” Illustrated manual at Demotech.

Once the waste has been deposited and the repository is full, the facility is to be sealed off and never opened again. Or so we hope, but can we ensure that? And how is it possible to warn our descendants of the deadly waste we left behind? How do we prevent them from thinking they have found the pyramids of our time, mystical burial grounds, hidden treasures? Which languages and signs will they understand? And if they understand, will they respect our instructions? While gigantic monster machines dig deeper and deeper into the dark, experts above ground strive to find solutions to this crucially important radioactive waste issue to secure mankind and all species on planet Earth now and in the near and very distant future.”

“Into Eternity”. Watch (75 min) & Read. Via TOD.

• The monster footprint of digital technology – how much energy does it take to manufacture electronics?
• iFixit – repair manuals online

These days, artists have no difficulty in finding free materials to work with. The same stuff can be used over and over again, for different purposes. One artwork can be transformed into another. Why can’t our industrial production system work the same way? Because it is automated and needs standardized parts. Mass production and re-use of scavenged materials don’t match, unless the materials undergo the (mostly energy-intensive) intermediate step of recycling.

Above: Hubcap creatures by Ptolemy Elrington (also see his lamps – why do we need new materials to make lamps? There is enough trash in the world to make lamps for another 10,000 years).