Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices. My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices.
My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
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For my initial results, I not only expected to find a method
to reuse at least some part of the cigarette, but also
to find seductive qualities in this form of waste that is
otherwise often met with disgust. After extensive small
scale material testing, machine testing with the Textile
Prototyping Lab and several conversations with chemists
from the Fraunhofer Institut in Potsdam and the
textile company Nanolose in Melbourne, I started questioning
whether the extracted toxins, in addition to the
amount of chemicals I would need to actually clean and
reform a cigarette butt, outweighed the benefit of reusing
an overabundant waste product. Was it really a silver
bullet, or were there instances where it contributed
to a neglect of greater problems? Growing disillusioned,
I decided to shift the solution from an actual application
to the communication of precisely this issue.
Set-up for interim presentation
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