Responsibility Knocks: A column for House & Garden

From our first waking moments we are responsible for our actions – usually habitual patterns of behaviour, unremarkable in themselves. We rise, we wash, we dress, we feed ourselves. But even in these simple choices there are layers of responsibility that can have wide impact – for good and for bad. Does our shampoo dish microplastics into the watercourse, is the container from which our toothpaste emerges going to get recycled – in fact is our whole ‘personal care’ regime being done at the expense of care for others and our shared planet? Our clothes, our breakfast foods, our transport to work – do they all compound the problem?

I’m afraid that more than likely they do. We are drawn into a system of societal provision that has not been designed to look after nature or other people less affluent than ourselves. We create enormous volumes of waste, we choose convenience as our entitlement and more often than not we are making choices that do not optimise good health.

So as designers, even before getting to work we have probably missed opportunities to be more responsible in our choices. Little surprise then that those we work with, our suppliers, or those that execute our designs are not assuming that they should make ‘responsible’ decisions on our behalf.

Business models are driven by the tenets of capitalism and so we have all adopted the language of ‘cost/budget/margin’ to inform our choices.

But what if the system was improved and became ‘compatibilism’ where a product would be sold at a profit, but only after it had been designed, made and delivered without a disproportionate environmental burden, or a disregard for the working conditions or human rights of others?

This is where responsibility comes in, because we are at a turning point. Free-markets do not have a moral compass – but we do. By thinking about what lies behind every commercial or design choice we make we can make better choices. To take responsibility we need to recognise that it will require more effort and time and that the results will usually cost more.

Greater cost is likely because the ‘free market’ currently allows businesses to outsource so much cost, rather than directing it to the individual consumer – public funds are used to deal with the waste that we create on a huge scale; but much of the environmental damage just comes at the expense of nature. We may not be paying this out of our pockets, but we are very clearly paying for it on an increasing scale in global pollution, extreme weather and loss of life.

Our job as designers is to create ‘paradise’ you might say – but without responsibility it risks being a ‘fool’s paradise’ 

Nature does not really do waste. In nature what is ‘waste’ from one part of the food chain becomes food for the next part of it. For centuries humans mimicked all other living things in this regard. Our agricultural system of feeding ourselves was based on the reuse of waste, constantly recirculating fertility to build the proteins and carbohydrates on which most life depends.

There was no ‘waste’ that naturally occurring organisms were unable to break down and rebuild. All that began to change when we discovered a resource hidden away deep under the earth and realised its potential to create fuel to drive machinery. This produced waste in the form of emissions and residue. To begin with we did not notice the emissions as they were mainly in the form of carbon dioxide that could be absorbed by trees and plants through photosynthesis. The residue was sludge until man’s ingenuity developed ways to process it into synthetic materials.

Unfortunately, the result is that waste is no longer ‘food’ – it is pollution. We are emitting more gases than the biosphere can process without heat gain and the synthetic materials, or ‘plastics’ as we generally know them, are persisting in the environment, inedible to any micro-organisms. We are responsible for breaking the chain – the circle of life and if we do not act, it will become a dead end.

In the UK we create 99 kilos of plastic waste per person, per year – a tonne every decade. We are second only to the US. That means that our taxes are required to process 6.7 billion tonnes of plastic waste EVERY year. Less than 10% of this is recycled. We are given plastic every day, around our food and drink and our consumer goods; just in a single day this amounts to well over 13 million pieces of single use cutlery/crockery. We are all responsible for this to a greater or lesser degree.

Nor can we wait for the Government to act on this. Although they are beginning to put the odd ban in place, there is still no mandatory requirement for every company using plastic to tell us how it can be recycled. No doubt the industry lobbies are at play, as we would then begin to understand how little they and government are really doing and we would realise that the production of more and more ‘recyclable’ plastic is no help if we are only recycling 10% of it.

It seems trite to recommend all those simple measures like, a bag for life, keep cups, beeswax covers, refillables, carrying your own cutlery, packed lunches, eschewing ‘disposables’ where you can; but if 67 million of us did this everyday it would have a real impact!

At work I try to observe where I receive the most involuntary plastic. Wrapping for couriers is an obvious one and one of the hardest to reform. But unless my supplier knows that I am concerned and we have a grown up conversation about the risk of damage versus the risks to the biosphere, nothing will change until the law does (which as we have seen is not happening very fast). When delivering furnishings to clients we use grey blankets woven from industrial waste fibre. They can be used multiple times and mean the customer can unwrap what you have sent in front of the haulier and you might be surprised what that does to give them a sense of responsibility for safe delivery.

We can start by insisting that packaging is compostable or recyclable, then we can work harder to find ways to not need it all (buying closer to home, or in season from markets, for instance).

Then there is the product itself. How many useful things end their useful life just for their looks? They are no longer fashionable, tastes change, ‘upgrades’ require it. It takes seconds to consign it to a skip, but it does not take many minutes to consider if it could be upcycled, repurposed, sold or given away. The sheer waste in unused clothing hanging in the country’s wardrobes is now well known.

Waste is a scourge of the modern age but in using or buying anything we have the opportunity to avoid or minimise it. I personally favour antiques and vintage, for a number of good reasons, but not least because more often than not they are repairable. Who here has tried to mend a plastic extrusion or reattach a fitting in mdf, on which the viability of the rest of the product’s utility depends?

In the design and construction industry we are particularly bad: with demolition factored in, it accounts for around 63% of what is sent to landfill. So we can take active steps to design our required destruction with thought. We can restrain ourselves and we can also try to restrain our clients! Destruction is, let’s face it, the opposite of creation, creativity’s first cousin.

So, avoid waste in the first place, redirect what would be wasted to a new purpose and don’t build in obselescence. But there is one more thing that I feel is mainly overlooked but actually has a far longer tail – what will happen to your design or your supply when it naturally  comes to the end of its useful life.

Take paint for instance: as soon as it is ‘finished with’ or ‘unwanted’ it becomes hazardous waste according to law. This is generally directed to the wet paint left over in cans, but what about the paint that is turned into dust when you rub it down, or it deteriorates through damage or building failures? Modern paints, coatings, glues and wallpapers basically become microplastics when they are turned to dust after use or over time.

The answer to this is to select natural materials wherever you have the choice and when you don’t to really make it your business to inform your client, builder or supplier exactly what the ramification of the end of life of the product are. The more we inform each other about these things the more our responsibility becomes collective and the more people there are invested in solving the (totally soluble) problem of waste.

– Words by Edward Bulmer