When I arrived in Delhi monsoon was still in full swing. The days were hot and muggy and you could only sleep with a fan or air conditioner.
A few days after I’d moved into my apartment, I decided to treat myself at the local ice cream parlour. The icecream was great but, at 80 rupees a scoop, definitely pricey.
On my stroll home I passed my neighbourhood dhalao, or waste collection centre.
Kailash Colony, South Delhi neighbourhood dhalao
It was getting dark, so I was startled by something scrabbling through the rotting food scraps, crumpled packaging and broken bits of crockery.
It was a man.
He stopped his sorting and turned towards me. We looked at each other for a moment.
It would be weeks before I understood the vital role he played in recycling my daily domestic waste.
I didn’t yet know that my ice cream cost around the same amount of money he would earn on an average day.
It would also be some time before I would learn about the Delhi government’s plans to remove the dhalaos (and his workspace) from the city.
And I certainly would never have predicted that one day, a couple of months from that moment, I would smash a glass bottle in my kitchen, then fret about how to dispose of the shards.
Because I would know then that Delhi’s recycling is often done by people with bare hands and no protective clothing.
But I wasn’t concerned with any of this then.
I just glanced away from him and continued walking.
Ok, so we’re heading into the home stretch with this project blog (just over a week to go until my final deadline: Sunday March 6). I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted about the Games PVC banner material.
So what happened to all those banners – all 25 tonnes of them?
Commonwealth Games banners stored at the warehouse
We made a heap of products and sold them for stash of cash, right?
Not quite.
I was trialling one of the sample PVC bags, taking it to all my meetings, usually stuffed full of things like a Macbook laptop and a waterbottle (no point mucking around when it comes to R&D).
On the way to a 'very important' meeting at the 2010 Commonwealth Games
A few weeks of this and I began noticing cracks in the folds – the PVC banners from the Games media event just weren’t durable enough for a bag in constant use. But what about the official Games wall wrap banners? Could we still use them?
Checking out the wall wrap banner material with Conserve India's sampling unit
Sadly, it turned out they were made of a similar form of PVC.
It’s called blackout flex – basically polyester thread spray painted with a thin PVC resin coating. Great for cheap, temporary advertising applications, but not so good for a high-end, durable fashion accessory.
It felt like we’d hit a dead end with our Games upcycling experiment. We made one last visit to the warehouse, thinking we’d collect a couple of the wall wraps for future experiments with the material.
But when we arrived we noticed these…
Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games street flags
Air India and Tissot Games sponsor flags - major brands being trashed...literally
Hero Honda and Central Bank of India: do you know where your brand is being dumped?
They were street flags, strung up across the city for the Games and made from a tougher form of PVC (blockout flex).
So, with clouds of disappointment rapidly lifting, we took as many of the flags as we could manage and hurried back to Conserve’s workshop.
As for the wall wrap banners, as far as we know, they were sold as cheap scrap to the city’s waste dealers. We’d like to think they ended up serving a useful second purpose. However, we can’t be certain.
But one thing is for sure, dear readers, it’s a little insane in the brain making so many of them in the first place, let alone without much thought for what happens to them when the party is over.
Looking forward to showing you what we did with the flags…
Ok, this is a little tangental, but it relates to life in my local Delhi neighbourhood. Right at the beginning of this journey, I published a spider diagram on some of the core personal things I wanted to work on throughout the project. One of them was getting off caffeine for a while………well. Um.
That didn’t quite happen.
But I did manage to substitute a coffee habit for a serious chai addiction. All that sweet, milky, tannin goodness on every street corner was just too good to pass up.
What wasn’t so great were the huge numbers of plastic chai cups piled up, and often burnt, in my very same ‘hood…
…fortunately, I discovered my well-used KeepCup along with a number of other surprise items in my luggage (let’s just say red wine and running late make for pretty random packing).
KeepCup in bike holder. Image courtesy of KeepCup.com blog
I decided, in order to keep up my chai habit, I’d need to let go of the throwaway plastic.
The art of tea: 'tis a serious business
So, with a lot of gesturing and a few quizzical looks from the locals, it was warm cups of tea almost every morning for the autorickshaw ride to work.
The KeepCup without lid and full of yum chai
P.S. A friend of mine once griped about how annoying it was only having disposable plastic cups when he wanted to have a drink at football matches in Melbourne.
We reckon it’s a blindingly good opportunity for KeepCup. Think about it: a reusable cup you can get custom made in your own team colours. What’s not to like?
P.S. I am in no way connected to KeepCup, I just like the product. And by the looks of their rapid global expansion others do to. First the world, then the MCG?
There were quite a few Games waste materials we identified during and just after the event. But establishing a viable upcycled product range takes quite a bit more than just finding materials.
Can the material be made into products fitting our current brand and organisational capacity? Can we afford to store enough of it? What about the product testing?
And of course, there’s the market development work – not many businesses can afford to produce products without some sort of guarantee they’ll sell.
So we had to be careful about which materials we accepted from the Games. Apart from the PVC banners we actively targeted, we were offered a few other interesting materials:
Recyclable waste directly from the Games Organising Committee Headquarters. This was mostly office waste – paper, cardboard and plastic bottles. Although Zitta Schnitt’s fabulous open source PET bottle purse designdid make us stop and ponder for a moment……………………we decided most of the materials weren’t suitable for durable fashion and homeware products.
Delhi 2010 Games Organising Committee Headquarters - inside and out
Temporary fencing and bunting cloth – during the Games, many events were cordoned off with thousands of temporary fences. We were offered these materials during the de-commisioning process after the event. We contemplated taking a small number of fences to trial some industrial furniture items (such as lampstands and shelving) as well as simple drawstring gym bags from the bunting material. But due to storage issues and the uncertainty factor regarding sales we had to say no.
Delhi 2010 temporary fencing and bunting material
You watch the athletes, we'll feel the fence. Scoping out venue bunting material.
Unused Delhi 2010 Games ticket envelopes made from Tyvek plastic – this was such an interesting material I’m dedicating tomorrow’s post to it.
So, there’s a lot to do in realising an upcycling business opportunity. One of the ideas we had about securing a buyer for our Games products was to approach upcoming major events – such as the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games – regarding upcycled merchandise.
Instead of cheap Chinese imports (like these merchandising items at one of the Delhi 2010 retail outlets)…
Is pillow fighting a Games sport?! Random cushion covers on sale at Delhi 2010 retail store
Fuzzy plastic cars and things. What the...
…why not products made directly from materials left over from the last mega event?
Can you see where i’m going with this?
Imagine: closing the loop on waste from one major event to the next; like playing hacky sack with materials for as long as you can.
It’s a big idea and one, I’m certain, with many challenges to be overcome. But it’s not impossible to change a human system is it?
We got a little excited by the possibilities and dashed off a few emails to the London 2o12 and Glasgow 2014 organising committees but, alas, no cigar.
Not even a polite ‘thanks but no thanks’ email.
These events are organised many years in advance and perhaps, for the London Olympics at least, the most sustainable products have already been secured for their branded merchandise? This is, after all, meant to be the ‘first sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games’. London 2012 Sustainability Plan, 2009
But when I logged on to the London 2012 shop I was surprised to find little, if any, details about the products other than most came from the manufacturer to the world – China.
Take, for example, a simple drawstring gym bag (sound familiar?) It’s made from polyester and quite cheap at 7 pounds. You could argue the Olympics, in an effort to be inclusive, has gone for low priced merchandise.
Maybe the sustainability credentials for each product just haven’t been made public? Maybe the organisers thought it wouldn’t make a difference to sales.
Maybe.
But it would be nice to have a choice, wouldn’t it?
Oh my, it’s been a really busy few weeks! Remember the British company we worked with in Delhi? Out of the blue they contacted me to see if I’d work on the sustainability part of a tender submission they’re putting together. I said,”Really? You’d pay me for doing something I enjoy? Yes please!” So I’ll be taking the next week to focus on this, but I’ll be be back soon to finish our project story.
Before signing off, I wanted to share with you a little piece of interesting reporting. It’s about trying to answer questions triggered by the journalist in my earlier post: why should the Games give you waste over giving it to poor people who lost their slum homes because of this event?
But did this really happen? Did people lose their homes because of the Games?
I never had much opportunity to physically go out and look for evidence of slum clearing by the city’s authorities during the Games. But a couple of enterprising Big Picture photographers did, and here’s what they documented:
Indian slum dweller Amit Kumar stands on the spot where his hut was demolished in New Delhi on September 27, 2010 as reported on Boston.com's The Big Picture (MANPREET ROMANA/AFP/Getty Images)
Children search for their belongings among the debris of demolished shanties in Gurgaon, in the northern Indian state of Haryana, September 30, 2010. The shanties were demolished by municipal workers near the Commonwealth Games shooting range on September 28, local media reported. (REUTERS/Parivartan Sharma)
Even more compelling evidence is revealed in Sumita Dasgupta’s startling piece on the unintended impact of clearing out the Gurgaon’s slum communities. I’ve sampled a small part of her article here, but I do recommend reading the full piece if you have 5 minutes to spare:
“…While the outer layer of the city had begun to shine, the colonies lying in the inner circles of Gurgaon suddenly looked shockingly shabby…The lanes inside the colonies were drowned in garbage, with plastic bottles, decaying vegetables, broken glass pieces strewn all over. This flood of filth had spilled over to Gurgaon’s arterial roads as well. The litter bins standing outside the gates had practically disappeared under the burden of waste.
So what went wrong? Well, when in the run up to the Games, the Gurgaon authorities decided to remove the slums, and drive out (albeit temporarily) the panic stricken people living there beyond the borders, they obviously had not realised how lethally this move was going to affect their Clean-Up operations. With the slum population gone, the lowest and the most critical link in the ranks of the city’s waste managers had gone missing too…” Games, Garbage and Gurgaon, Centre for Science and Environment, 13 Oct, 2010
So I guess there was a cost to the Delhi 2010 Games that may not readily show up on any final accounting reports – because, dear readers, it was human.
P.S. In case you haven’t clocked it yet, where an image, idea or words are from someone else I’m trying to make sure they’re fully attributed. It’s always a tricky one when you don’t have a lot of money to pay someone for their creative output (which is – as my creative professional friends say – the ultimate in attributing!)
But I was reminded there’s still a lot of value in ‘right proper’ sharing on the internet by Rosscott and Loldwell’s amusing comic strip on the topic. It’s ‘pretty cool’…so I’m sharing it… with credit…where it’s due.
“Rosalie’s gone under. It’s nuts. We went down to help but were turned away. We’re ok for now.” This was the response from my sister in Red Hill this morning, when I contacted her about the floods in Brisbane. Most of my family live there so the past 24 hours have been a little worrying.
And it seems incredible that only last week I was at the 21st Century Art exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. (GOMA is right on the Brisbane River and could be seriously affected by the rising water.)
As soon as I stepped through the gallery door I was greeted by what looked like a vast, plastic egg sack hanging from the roof.
GOMA's 21st Century Art installation view of Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Plastic bags 2001-10 | Photography by Natasha Harth
It made me a little overwhelmed and nervous. I felt as if, at any moment, the sack would split open, unleashing a trillion more plastic bags upon us, and I found myself giving it a wide berth. (And now I’m concerned it’s floating down the river.)
At the time, it made me reflect on a trend I’ve been noticing recently – that of contemporary artists repurposing and reusing discarded materials to create new works of art; like this installation inside the New Delhi Railway Station…
Naresh Kapuria, Chai Garam, New Delhi Railway Station (2010)
…And this piece at last year’s Sydney Biennale…
Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, Sydney Biennale (2010)
…As well as any number of pieces created for San Francisco’s recent Smart Art Competition.
So the question I’ve been pondering is this:
Using our original upcycling definition, does this use of end-of-life materials create ‘valuable, useful or simply aesthetically pleasing items’? Is it upcycling?
Well I’m not sure any of the artworks above are particularly useful. And the notion of ‘aesthetically pleasing’ is just too subjective to argue (beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all).
But what about valuable: is this kind of art valuable? I know this is a big question, possibly beyond a post to explore, but for me it goes straight to the heart of sustainability – what do we really value in this world?
I’m not talking about monetary value (although Vik Muniz’s ‘Pictures of Garbage’ art, captured in the Wasteland documentary, sold for around USD $250,000). But rather, intrinsic value.
I find this kind of art valuable, not only for the clever use of materials, but because artists responding to a changing planet helps me make sense of what’s going on in the world.
The scientists speak to my head, while the artists speak to my heart.
And, like the swollen Brisbane River, they all seem to be saying we are breaching our natural limits.
conservedelhi2010.wordpress.com 