Design for the Wasted
A Dream
For my whole life, I have been living mostly in cities, one of them is Surabaya. Surabaya is the second biggest city in Indonesia, a country which is the second biggest plastic polluters in the world. What made things worse was, Surabaya City is located in Java Island, the most populous island in the world by today. Similar with most developing countries, in Indonesia, trash separation and waste management are hardly done yet.
When I was almost got into my thesis research proposal, I remember thinking: what are the urgent problems in Surabaya that design might help?
Then I remembered the piling municipal solid waste around. But that day, I still had no idea what design can do with those trash. Until one evening I came over a Pecha Kucha talk online of a Japanese named Akira Sakano. She talked about a town namely Kamikatsu, or a "Zero Waste Village". Watching it had inspired me a lot that day. Watching it made me believe that maybe we can do something for trash. Watching it made me realize that difficult does not mean impossible.
A Decision
In September 2014, I returned to Surabaya to work on my thesis proposal. I chose a design thinking proposal for Surabaya municipal solid waste management idea. I remember almost all my professors got confused as most interior design students would have chose some existing buildings to be redesigned into better places, while I chose some existing trash piles to be rethought about for a better environment. In last moment, I was beyond lucky to have at least one professor accepted my proposal. My design research learned about 4 types of mostly found solid waste in Surabaya: glass, rubber, plastic, and metal. Although it had no certain designed result planned, but it taught me one thing: value exists everywhere, even in the dirtiest place. If we know this value, we will learn to respect it and eventually people will join hand for it. Finally, the research was done and resulted in an online learning platform named Trash for Good.
A Miracle
Last 2016, I have been living in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, for a social design internship project. Some weeks earlier, before I first came to Japan, I asked Masuda Sensei, the man who made this all possible:
"Do you know a place name Kamikatsu and the Zero Waste Academy? I heard they have a great trash management system. That place inspired my thesis work."
"I know about Kamikatsu Town and have visited there a month ago. It is a small village in the mountain in Shikoku Island. The village is known for so called "leaf business" collecting beautiful leaves from trees every different seasons for Japanese restaurants as decoration of dishes. They also are known for the waste zero project. All 1.300 villagers have to bring all their everyday waste to a waste station run by NPO Zero Waste Academy. They are asked to separate waste into 36 different categories at the collecting point. This activity has started to minimize the cost for waste treatment by the municipality. And it seems that this system is also effective to reduce the production of the waste. If you are interested in visiting Kamikatsu town, I will take you there during you internship in Japan."
For details story upon the trip to Kamikatsu, please visit our story here.
For making this story possible, my special thanks goes to :
Fumikazu Masuda (open house Inc.)
Akira Sakano, Terumi Azuma & Kiyohara (Zero Waste Academy Japan)
MLG.24.1.2017
