Global Recycling Day! ♻️

With the last decade being the hottest on record due to climate change, we are now living through and facing a climate emergency. If we don’t make an impact of change, we will continue to see the rise of global temperatures, rapid deforestation, the melting of icecaps, more droughts, intense increase of storms, floods and more devastation.

Planet Earth has already been living a cyclical model for billions of years before humans arrived. As humans, we take, use, and dispose of a product, creating a linear economy. Take for instance buying a new fashion trend item that just came out, and "throwing away" the old one. Every time we throw something "away", we produce toxic waste in the landfills, not to mention contributing to the global warming due to the emissions created by producing that item.

We have the power to change our perspective of what to consume and recycle. So we can work towards living in a circular economy world, just like Earth naturally does.

Reality Check: Recycling won’t be enough to overcome the sheer amount of waste we produce. The goal is to have a circular economy, but for now we have to take the existing trash and recycle it. We need to design, create, and produce products with the end life in mind to close the loop to make a difference. In a circular economy, we need to re-think and re-design products that completely eliminates both waste and pollution, circulate products by creating safe, compostable, biodegradable, & natural materials, and regenerate nature.

“In a properly-built circular economy, one should rather focus on avoiding the recycling stage at all costs. Preventing waste from being created in the first place is the only realistic strategy.” - World Economic Forum

How we can aim for a circular economy?
Learn about materials by downloading the Materials Designer’s Book by @materialdesigners @elisavabcn @ma_tt_er and @polimi

Material Designers Book is a resourceful knowledge guide that provides a better understanding on how materials design contribute to attain a more circular economy.

See Life Cycle of a product by V. Ryan