Fashionistas push for waste prevention

Source: fashionindustrynetwork.com

Last 10 years we watch a global shift from end of pipe waste management to waste prevention and reuse concepts. This shift clearly moves us closer to resource management optimization processes rather than the typical waste management activities. It concerns more industrial supply chains than the waste management industry and the usual end of pipe solutions.


But at the same time it provides a new practical view on how we deal with waste. It helps us a lot to understand waste as an indication of inefficient production and consumption patterns. In other terms, it helps us to understand that Waste is a Choice, as my friend Maarten Goorhuis (ISWA STC Vice-Chair and Chair of the ISWA Working Group on Recycling and Waste Minimization) usually says starting his presentations about waste prevention.


A good example of that way of thinking is given by some initiatives in the textile & clothing manufacturing sector. The real importance of them is that they try to combine effectiveness in waste prevention by utilizing personal attitudes and behavioral trends. Let’s see more details.


We all know that rapidly changing fashions increase the production and consumption of textiles and clothing. And definitely, they also increase the amount of end of life clothes that are driven to waste, in one or another way. Despite improvements in the environmental impacts in the manufacture of textile and clothing over the last 25 years, the overall volume of production and consumption of these products has increased. The relocation of manufacturing from Western countries to Asian nations and more efficient production has reduced the cost of clothing and textiles, but this has had the unintended consequence of increasing consumption and counteracting some of the environmental benefits of new manufacturing technologies.


In addition, the fast cycles of fashion and deliberately planning products to have a limited lifespan have shortened the life cycle of textiles and clothing. Garments have become cheaper, the quality reduced and clothes are typically worn for only a short time before disposal. Although reuse and recycling of clothing has also increased, this only partly offsets the increased levels of textile consumption, the proliferation of textile waste, and the environmental and social impacts, (such as where and how fibres are cultivated) associated with higher volumes of textiles and clothing production. 



A recent study (Niinimäki, K., Hassi, L. (2011) Emerging design strategies in sustainable production and consumption of textiles and clothing. Journal of Cleaner Production 19: 1876-1883) provided the suggestion that a more sustainable production and consumption of clothing could be achieved if consumer values are used to rethink design and business strategies. A good example could be an increased personalization of clothing that could increase both consumer attachment to products and their useful lifetime.


The study explored different design strategies that increase the lifespan of textiles and clothing by making the consumer the centre of the innovation processes. It argues that innovative thinking about how consumers experience and value textiles and clothes is needed for more sustainable production and consumption.


For example, the use of a product could be extended if it is designed to be personalized. This would allow consumers to develop an emotional attachment with the garment or textile and can be achieved by mass customization of products using fast digital manufacturing technologies that enable consumers to select from a variety of styles and colors to design their own look. Digital textile printers, embroidery and laser cutting machines can design products tailored to an individual’s specifications.


The manufacture of ‘halfway products’, for example, kits that offer consumers the opportunity to creatively assemble (and repair) the product could also increase attachment and usage, as could clothing designed with detachable parts that can be customized by the consumer.
In addition, designers can co-create products with consumers to increase attachment to the product, for example, through the internet, with consumers making the final design decisions. Services that focus on consumer needs can also be used to extend the lifetime use of textiles and clothing and postpone product replacement. For example, high-quality garments that can be used in renting, leasing, lending or sharing schemes; and services that modify the garments can all be offered. New business opportunities could be found in this switch to a services-orientated economy; manufacturers can offer higher quality garments, increase customer satisfaction and extend the use of the product. 


At least, we hope that this may be a succesful initiative - after all if waste prevention becomes trendy, there will be positive impacts worldwide, especially in the global interconnected cities where fashion plays a crucial role...

Smart waste management: Power to the people!

This post is the second one which is dedicated to address the issue of waste management in global cities and megacities. In the previous one (see waste management in global cities ) I concluded that we need to apply Complexity Theory techniques in order to manage waste management systems in global cities. In this one, I am going to give some practical views on how to do it. 

In a recent lecture I delivered in Brasilia, Brazil, during the XII Conferência das Cidades, at November 29 of 2011, I was presenting different possibilities to utilize modern technologies for a better urban waste management.  The lecture was really successful and after the conference I received several invitations to deliver it in different audiences. 

I closed my lecture saying that “after all, if the combined use of social media, internet, SMSs and mobile phones delivered the collapse of Mubarak and other non-democratic regimes during the Arab spring, I am sure we can use the same tools for a radical improvement of waste management in our cities”. And this is exactly my point regarding complexity management in global cities and megacities.

Few months ago, I was reading an excellent article in Scientific American, with the title “the Social Nexus”, written by Carlo Ratti and Antony Townsend. In this article I discovered several smart applications that are already applied in different parts of the world and their purpose is to improve, monitor and control the urban environment. 

As professor Carlo Ratti put it “ Truly smart—and real—cities are not like an army regiment marching in lock­step to the commander’s orders; they are more like a shifting flock of birds or school of fish, in which individuals respond to subtle social and behavior­al cues from their neighbors about which way to move forward… Rather than focusing on the installation and control of network hardware, city governments, technology companies and their urban-planning advisers can exploit a more ground-up approach to creating even smarter cities in which people become the agents of change. With proper technical-sup­port structures, the populace can tackle problems such as energy use, traffic congestion, health care and education more effectively than centralized dictates. And residents of wired cities can use their distributed intelligence to fashion new community activities, as well as a new kind of citizen activism.”

Then I visited the web-site Trash Track. In this web-site I discovered some impressive visualizations of an experiment that was done just to demonstrate that for waste management there is a huge potential available if we use the modern technologies and the interconnected citizens in an appropriate way. Please visit the web-site and you will be impressed as I was, I am sure about it. And allow me to congratulate proffesor Rati and his team from the Senseable City Lab for this excellent initiative which opens new horizons for waste management. 

So, as you can imagine, this is more or less my main idea: to manage the complexity of waste management systems in global cities and megacities with the power of the already interconnected people. Or in another phrasing, to replace the traditional top-down approaches to planning and infrastructure delivery with a bottom-up approach that is based on crowd-sourcing. 

In urban areas, where a lot of people are using mobile phones, laptops and tablets, where smart phones do release new unimagined possibilities of interaction and rapid information, we can use them in order to have substantial improvements in waste management! But even where smart phones are limited and simple mobile phones are available, the power of SMS is enough to deliver crowd – based monitoring and improvements of waste management.

Especially to the areas of street cleaning, collection, recycling and waste prevention, there can be radical improvements with limited cost! And this is exactly what we need during this period of global financial instability! The power of massive social collaboration is something that can be proven more powerful than any advanced technologies for collection and treatment of waste - and still it is ignored. We  must start thinking in a different way and we have to do it now!

There are just two pre-conditions for that.

A.      To give citizens all the tools to do it (not so difficult and definitely affordable) and, most importantly

B.   To inspire them in order to have a continuous feedback from them, to make them real human sensors of the problems in waste management, to create the right atmosphere and motivate people in order to increase social participation and interest for waste management.

After all, the only way to use the potential of new technologies is to provide a meaningful and interactive citizenship. But this is supposed to be the core purpose of any urban governance, right? 

Let’s try to think that way. I am sure we have a lot to learn and much more to deliver. And I am sure that managing complexity with a network of thousands human sensors will be much more effective than ignoring it, as we usually do today. 

Waste management in global cities

This is the first post of two that address the issue of waste management in global cities and megacities.I will try to resume some of my major findings during last two years. There will be a special event dedicated to waste management and global cities at the World Cities Summit 2012 and soon the whole program will be available - as far as I know top speakers are included. 

My research was in the framework of the ISWA project “Globalization and waste management” which is going to be presented in Florence 2012 Conference (see the excellent web-site) for the first time. ISWA;s Task Force has worked in four different packages namely a. megacities and waste management b. informal sector as a global stakeholder c. global recycling markets and d. international aid tools and their utilization.

Although the project is still on - going and there is a lot of work to be done until we will have complete it, there are some key-issues that I have concluded, especially about  global cities, which means cities that are highly interconnected in the globalization network. Some of the things I learnt have been already presented during ISWA 2011 conference in Daewoo, South Korea (see ISWA's knowledge base and search for megacities). 

Studying the triangle “Globalization – Megacities – Waste Management”  my major conclusion is that a waste management system in a global city or a megacity is much more than a local system because a. It is part of the global network of material flows b. It is highly affected by global consumerism trends and c. it is directly influenced by global regulations and initiatives related to waste management. Of course someone would easily complete that this is also true for other smaller or less globalized cities but this does not affect the core of the conclusion.

That complex dynamics between global and local markets, global and local governance, global and local stakeholders is a key issue for understanding waste management in  global cities.

As a result in megacities and global cities institutional development, social support and participation and financial sustainability (or the Software elements of waste management) are becoming more and more important especially for the success of recycling, reuse and waste prevention initiatives. They are highly sensitive to the continuous change of the neighborhoods and the appearance of “cities within the city”, especially to the poorest ones where inadequate waste management practices create serious health and environmental risks. Clearly, the Software elements control the social behaviour of citizens and thus they are the most important for the success of recycling, reuse and waste prevention programs.

It seems that a major barrier comes from the complex interactions between the hundreds stakeholders involved in a global city waste management. Another serious barrier comes from the lack of initiatives to integrate informal sector to waste management activities. 

From those remarks, it is obvious that the overall performance of a global city waste management system results from continuous interactions between global and local markets, emerging social behaviour, city governance, global and local stakeholders, city growth etc. And those interactions are hardly described by the traditional waste management approaches which are based on engineering and logistics.

The problem might be more general. As long as we face SWM as a matter of appropriate storage, collection, transfer, treatment and disposal and the main effort was to minimise environmental and health impacts, engineering and logistic tools were sufficient to plan and implement waste management systems. But today, resource management and social behaviour are becoming an organic part of any waste management system and they are essential to address increasing recycling rates and better quality of recyclables, participation of industrial stakeholders, eco-design initiatives and closed loops of products and materials.

Consequently, engineering and logistic tools are not enough to plan and deliver waste management systems in global cities. Especially in a megacity, the overall waste management system should be considered as “complex system”, which means a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behaviour among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.

Complexity theory and Complex Systems Science (CSS) is a relatively new field of research focused on systemic understanding, self-organization, irreducibility, emerging patterns and properties and non-linear behaviour. Complexity science has been rapidly evolved during the last 20 years for the study of complex physical, biological and social systems. Cities as a whole may be considered as emerging entities existing near a critical point of self organization, far from equilibrium and qualitatively different from their constituent residents and subsystems.

Waste management systems in global cities should be studied using complexity theory and complex systems science tools because:

• The overall performance of a megacity waste management system is the result of complex interactions between global and local stakeholders, global and local material flows, global and local recycling markets, global and local governance etc.

• Effective recycling, waste prevention and reuse programs are of high importance for a megacity since they improve self-resilience and relief waste management systems. However, those programs are directly linked with social behaviour and the emerging system performance is a result of thousands or millions daily interactions.

•  In global cities and megacities, local patterns and heterogeneity are the rule in waste management and micro-local dynamics have an impact at the system performance through their aggregate effects but also because they influence urban change iteratively through local connections and impacts.

• In metropolitan areas there are a number of councils, utilities, regional and governmental authorities, NGOs, private sector companies, informal sector unions, municipal utilities etc. Each of these entities is operating according the rules of limited awareness and jurisdiction, and self-interest and with selected connections to other entities. The dynamics of stakeholders’ interaction in megacities cannot be predicted or modelled with the usual information tools 

But is it any easy and practical way to manage Complexity in global cities? Or the ideas above are just theoretical approaches? The answer will arrive at the next post