Interactions - July/August 2009

Photograph by Victor Margolin

unsustainable levels of pollution in our air, land, and water. The accumulation of trash and garbage is also approaching unsustainable levels, where there will no longer be space to bury any more of it, nor will poor countries be willing to take it, even if they are paid well to do so.

To explain to the public how the waste economy works will require a massive education effort, one that politicians would be well advised to support. We must first identify the many kinds of natural and synthetic waste, and then clarify how it is currently handled. Finally, we must understand how a sustainable waste economy would work.

Bits and pieces of this knowledge are already public and have prompted the involvement of activists. Communities have rallied to protest chemical dumping in public waterways, heavy polluting from coal-fired factories, and the inefficient disposal of nuclear waste. As consumers, however, some of us tolerate excessive packaging, insufficient opportunities to recycle, and the manufacturing of products that render our land, water, and air more toxic.

There are also social groups who advocate less consumption and urge the design of products that can last longer. All these efforts are worthwhile but can be strengthened and expanded as we better understand how the waste economy works in a flow-through society and how dysfunctional it is in a cul-de-sac culture.

As a social product, the waste economy calls for a comprehensive design approach. Just as economists are trained to think about the financial economy as a system, we need trained experts who can think about the waste economy in a similar fashion. Designers are essential to enabling the transformation from an unsustainable to a sustainable waste economy. We not only need new products that can last longer, be disassembled, be reconverted, and can function without toxic components, we must also find ways to package products with materials that can be more easily recycled or reused. And finally, we need new systems to generate economic value through collecting natural and human waste and transforming it into new products. A few far-sighted people have

begun to work in these areas, but they mostly lack the ability to link their efforts to those of others in a systemic way.

At stake in attempting to create a sustainable waste economy is the issue of whether or not we can avoid social obesity, something that can paralyze us logistically, physically, and economically.

The current financial crisis has shown us that capable minds are available to consider better alternatives to the failed economic system that has caused such financial havoc. Until we understand that there is a systemic waste economy that is malfunctioning and nearing critical limits, we are not in a position to imagine large-scale interventions. We need to learn more about how waste economies function, clarify for the public the mechanisms of the current system, and assess which can contribute to a new sustainable waste economy and which are the equivalent of toxic financial assets. We also need purposeful action to avert the level of disaster in the environment that we have recently seen in the world of finance.

Steven Heller

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Victor Margolin is professor emeritus of design history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a founding editor and now co-editor of

the academic design journal Design Issues.

Margolin has published widely on diverse design topics. He has written, edited, or coedited several books including: The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1936; Design Discourse; Discovering Design; The Idea of Design; and The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. He is currently working on a world history of design.