The People’s Lab Launched week’s Festival Zero Waste in Paris : ZWE Launches Circular Economy Project to Improve Product Design
An international project aimed at identifying and redesigning poorly designed and wasteful products and pave the way for a Circular Economy was launched by Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) at last week’s Festival Zero Waste event in Paris.
The organisation explained that the People’s Design Lab is an online platform targeting products that break too early, that are not repairable, that are toxic, that are not suitable for recycling or which for any other reason are unfit for a Circular Economy.
The project is intended to enable citizens to take action in highlighting the problems and identifying the zero waste solutions.
ZWE said that the nomination stage of the People’s Design Lab will run to 2 September this year and will identify some of the worst designed and most wasteful products. This will be followed by two rounds of voting to choose the products that will be receive close attention in the redesign stage, in which solutions to wasteful design will be proposed.
During the third stage of the project ‘Redesign Workshops’ will be held across Europe and have opportunities for online participation, allowing a wide range of stakeholders (citizens, designers, entrepreneurs, public authorities, etc.) to have their say in how the products are redesigned for a zero waste future.
After that, ZWE said that efforts will be made to turn these ideas into reality. This process will aim to tackle to the problem on both the legislative level and by directly engaging companies guilty of producing wasteful products.
Examples of badly designed products which have already been submitted include boiled eggs removed from their shells and repackaged in individually wrapped plastic containers, and iMac chargers which were claimed to be prone to breaking sooner than expected.
“Waste is just a symptom, if we want to fix the problem we have to focus on the source, creating a world where everything is designed for repair, reuse and recycling,” commented Zero Waste Europe, policy officer Delphine Lévi Alvarès. “The People’s Design Lab will facilitate the involvement of citizens in highlighting problematic design and finding creative and innovative solutions.”
ZWE added that the People’s Design Lab takes inspiration from the Little Museum of Bad Industrial Design in Italy, and ‘The People’s Design Lab UK’, where examples of bad design were identified by groups of citizens and attempts were made to redesign the products with zero waste alternatives.
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