Wiki-Waste-Workshop / Waste It's Mine It's Yours

Globally some 2 billion people do not have access to waste collection and 3 billion do not have access to controlled waste disposal (UN, 2015). Many communities are suffering as a consequence and waste is now seen as a development problem as well as an environmental issue (WasteAid). Materialists, technologists and resource managers all seek to ‘valorise’ waste within scalar, circular systems as an industrial, technical process – but within smaller maker-movement-projects multi-values are being unearthed and revealed through re-making. These more ‘virtuous-circular-economies’ illustrate how the crafting with waste can catalyse new opportunities, reform personal identities and remake new cultural connections.

This work builds on research of Ballie et al (Waste-for-Life) and Hakkens (Precious-Plastics) exploring co-learning and networked communities of materials recycling and the methods to support community level circular economies (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, British Council) in enabling the delivery of UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Research questions:
• What is the role of (re)making in revealing the social, economic and environmental opportunities afforded through the valorisation of waste in underdeveloped communities?
• What technologies and methods support the knowledge exchange, co-design and collaborative production strategies for more ‘virtuous-circular-economies’?

This paper and associated objects, re-made-from-waste is formed around a case-study community in a township in South Africa. It will articulate research-through-making methods and will provide new insights into the interrelationships between people, process, production and place and making benefits afforded through the re-valorisation of waste. These range from creative education, sustainable entrepreneurship, social cohesion and personal pride and new identity and opportunity. It also provides new insights and builds on knowledge of diffuse and distributed manufacturing possibilities within inter-connected communities of co-learning and the tests models for inclusive making and

This case-study received funding through The British Council DICE fund and was in collaboration with Dreamcatcher Foundation.