The talk gives an overview on previous Basurama’s work and goes into detail about RUS project (Urban Solid Waste) and specially on the case study of RUS Lima.

The project is a public waste audit: to make it comprehensible and visually compelling. If you want more information check Trans Trash blog.

If you plan to participate, shoot us an email to boston[arroba]basurama.org

Download .mp3

Listen:

Slides:

On thursday 4th we will be participating in the event OAF POP-UP: YOUNG SPANISH ARCHITECTS, held in the 0047 Gallery, organized by Gisle Nataas and the Norske Arkitekters Landsforbund.
We will speak about how crisis affected us, and together with La Col, Raons Públiques and Zuloark (business as usual with them, but different this time ) as proposed by Ethel Barahona
Check al the info of the event in english here and in norwegian here

If you are in the area, please join us and contribute to the debate!

When: Wednesday, April 3, 2013 – 6:00pm
Where:  Barker Center, Seminar Room 133, Harvard University. 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

From 7th to 12th of March we will be walking around London streets. We are looking for people, spaces, places, social research laboratories, universities, etc. to meet, share, hang out and, if lucky, share a European project we are developing.

If you know of interesting places to visit or people to meet, send us a twit to @ basurama under the hashtag # BinLondon will be very grateful.

Thank you very much!

From 10a.m to 6p.m. we will be talking, working, arguing, fighting and questioning with and against the MA students for Module 3 of the MA programme.

We will test their capacity to see the things in a different way: lateral thinking, participation, creativity, to sincronize local resource, …and a quite long etc!

If you are near by Limerick please: join us!

We promise it will be fun.

According to Bangkok Metropolitan Administration  every day more than 600,000 plastic bags are used in Bangkok (a city with over 9 million inhabitants). Most of this bags become a residue in an approximately time that goes between 12 to 20 minutes. According to city officials, its annual disposal costs more than 600 million baht (18.5 million dollars).

Plastic Bang! Kok project used plastic bags, a daily symbol of harmless hyperconsumption, as the smallest singularity from which explode and expand.

Plastic bags as the only raw material for building an urban scale  intervention that brings us closer to the duality CONSUMPTION / WASTE and its social and environmental impact.

Display  this garbage from under the sink into an urban scale intervention, because with no coincidences it has itself an urban scale! How many football fields occupy the dumping sites in the peripheries of cities?

Some monsters feed themselves on fear, ours -as in Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away- grew as the consumption of plastic bags get bigger.

To visualize the mass and daily use of plastic bags and become aware of their  implications, we built an inflatable Monster Garden, fragile, tender, scary, maybe, but with the disturbing point of  things you know should not be where they are.

During the project we worked with two bundles of 60 kilos bags filled directly from the landfill. The profile of the bags reflect the consumption patterns of the city 1/3 of the stock was up to color bags from shops consumption, ⅓ of white and transparent bags from supermarkets and plastic wraps and ⅓ of black trash bags. These percentages and the particular characteristics of these bags were reflected in the size and appearance of each of the monsters built.

The work was carried out at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). During four days we washed, perfumed, repair, put them a sunday dress …We have spent a lot of time taking care of the plastic bags, healing them, learning to value them and reuse them.

Funded by:

With the support:

Context
The plastic bag, a daily symbol of consumerism, will be the starting point of the project and the raw material to generate different artistic discourses. The interventions will highlight the existent duality of CONSUME / TRASH and its social and environmental impact.

According to the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, more than 600,000 plastic bags are used in the city every day. Most of them will be eventually converted into waste in approximately 12 to 20 minutes. However, to be biodegraded a plastic bag could take between 15 to 1000 years.

Its annual disposal costs more than 600 million baht (18.5 million US$), according to Bangkok administration.

Be aware of these data and make them accessible and visible to citizens is essential to understand how people is related to consume, to their environment and the city in which they live.

There is an increasing need to tackle the complex realities of cities by addressing and incorporating stakeholders collective knowledge in the development and implementation of urban solutions for the management of public spaces: organizations or individuals, and range from public and private organizations, to experts and politicians, to media and citizens.

Local Squares is a training for urban planners that aims at identifying and experiencing participatory approaches in local urban contexts. The Training focuses on the design, development and testing of a toolbox of strategies and approaches to involve a broader diversity of stakeholders in the management of public spaces.

The Partnership will be composed of seven Partners from five countries:

• Interactive Workshop of Europe GbR (DE)
• Local Intelligence (NL)
• PlanSinn GmbH (AT)
• Catholic University of Louvain (BE)
• INCA Deutschland e.V. (DE)
• Stichting Elos Nederland (NL)
• Basurama (ES)

Founded by

Installation for the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012 at the Galata Greek School.

The Bubble was not actually designed, its shape came out of the plastics actually available at the biennial when we arrived and the courtyard provided to be exhibited.

It is inflatedonly using twodomestic fans.

The same techniques and materials used to package and wrap were used to build the bubble, allowing us to finish it in one day work and for only a 10€ cost.Taking care of waste is an act of love that transforms it into something desirable instead of deplorable.

Using waste for building the bubble was a way of proposing a new way of looking at the biennale. No one thought about the waste as waste, not paying attention to it when discarding, neither once collected to be used as building material.

The bubble was projected to be used as an urban intervention dispositif. We invite anyone explore this tecnhique, improve it and use it for that purpose or others. Is cheap, easy and very available, since  about 300 million plastic bags are discarded in Istanbul every year.

You can see a gallery with photos of the installation.

USW Cairo: Ramadan lights is a project for the design and construction of low cost prototypes to activate public spaces in the city of Cairo.

The prototypes were constructed during a workshop with young Egyptian professionals, mostly architects and urban artists.

After design and construction, the prototypes were set up in two urban environments in order to test the feasibility, performance and interaction of the constructed objects with public space (both people and environment).

Cairo, Egypt, Africa. From 15^th June to 8^th July 2012.

Special thanks to:

Elvira Giráldez (Elnamla asociation)
Ruth Jurado (Elnamla asociation)
Omar Nagati (CLUSTER studio)

More information:

Process images
Project images
Video

Related articles on Basurama Blog (in spanish):

El Cairo, la basura, las empresas españolas y Garbage Dreams
Zabbaleen

Funded by:

Spanish Embassy in Egypt

60 volunteers from 12 cultural centers attended the formation course. During the 8 days workshop last, participants learned how to work with local materials in a different way, how to use domestic tools and how to apply simple, easily and reproducible construction techniques.

The chosen space for the playground construction was where the Ganda Cultural Center waste used to be burned. In the workshop we have used 4 materials: pallets, tires, garbage bags and jerry cans, everything was found on the street or came from the abundant flea markets in the Niamey.

The project culminated with a conference about cultural management which involved two cultural officers of the Spanish Cooperation Office and the Spanish Embassy and the directors of the 12 Niamey cultural centers. Basurama acted as advisor on models of self-management and networking.

With our most sincere thanks to:

Sara Marquez (OTC responsible culture of Spain in Niger).
Fatima Djiré (director of CCOG).

More information:

Project images
Pictures of the workshop
Video of the process

Related articles on the Blog Basurama (in spanish):

Katako casi
Residuos casi
Invierno casi
África y el bidónde plástico

Talk at the seminar “From Landscapes of Extraction to Creative Industries of Organic Matter and Waste” at Graduate School of Design Harvard, Cambridge MA, USA on February 14th 2011.

How much waste do we buy?

We’ve been asking ourselves the same question since many years ago. We’ve been thinking different ways how to show the world the absurdity of buying and wasting so much material. From the objects in Basurmantes exhibition Nacidos para morir (Born to die, 2004) to the video Chainwork (2008), to mention some, we’ve been trying possible ways.

This time we wanted to add some numbers to the equation. We didn’t want ‘numbers’ extracted from data bases generated by governments and recycling companies. We just wanted to know how much waste we buy. We’ve figured out a simple equation:

Waste Packaging Index (WPI) = Packaging / Total Weight of the product

Products with no packaging, like a tomato, would have a 0% WPI, and merchandising products that are onlye packaging would be 100% WPI.

Workshop, hands on!

We started with a small amount of products in our first “Dissect Waste” workshop. We went to the supermarket and bought different articles: what a joy to know that we are buying waste! Our purpose was to weigh the products and their packaging to make a straight forward visualizations of the data obtained.

Data were collected and shared publicly, so that everyone can use or add more information to them. We decided to use only available online tools, no need of programming skills: a simple spreadsheet at gdocs.

Weighing and labeling all the products took us a long time: we were ‘forced’ to eat and drink milk, beer, cookies an juice in order to not spoil the items purchased! Once we were finished we could arrange the products in order related to the Waste Packaging Index. With the help of a projector we were displaying on the table the bar chart with the different data from the WPI.

This was just the first visualization that we’ve planned to do with the participants. We wanted a question to arise naturally, and it happened: ”Is it enough to measure the weight? Depending on the type of material some products are more harmless than others. How to compare the tetrapack (aluminium, plastic and cardboard put together) with a cardboard coated box? Is weight the only measure?”

Actimel, a kind of yougurt sold in very small plastic bottles, was among the objects with less WPI. Some participants in the workshop suggested that it should be taken out the visualization, to not mislead suggesting that Actimel was a “good” with not much packaging product. We know that this product had plastic, cardboard and aluminium.  We prefered to let it be and comment the flaws of the systems. One visualization, one data set, one equation, one index is always limited but it is still a powerful tool.

We knew we needed to go deeper, and that is what we want to research. We had prepared a series of other WPI that took in account things like:

• the volume of the materials (both compresed and uncompresed)
• the price of the materials, both up and downstreaming (materials as raw products or the price you get when recycling)
• the footprint of the materials (we were thinking on using footprinted API)
• materials depending on where are they going to end theirs lives (recycling, reuse, burnt, disposed in a land fill)

Anyway, we still love the Waste Packaging Index: it’s simple to measure and you don’t rely on other third party data to calculate it. It’s true that it has its limitations, but it still helps understand the quantity of waste we buy.

At the right of our bar chart were the raw materials: an apple, at the left light products with a lot of packaging, like the tea bags. We are so used to them that we do not realize that tea bags,tea lables, tea strings and tead boxes are not needed: we just need some good tea leaves to enjoy a good tea!
Both the workshop and the Waste Packagin Index are good ways to explain the importance of creating and sharing our own data sets. We live surrounded by data, in the information age, but we still need to generate our own data sets to measure what we need. We can not only rely on data provided by recycling companies (in Berlin those data tell that 100% of the plastic is recycled, obviously controversial if the only plastic that it’s being measured is the one that arrives to the recycling plant).

That’s why initiatives regarding #opendata, like the collective efforts of the Public Laboratory to realease available aerial photography information or a specrophotomereal data base, are so important to give citizens the information they need.

We are now planning future workshops and creating a digital tool to gather data to make Waste Pacakging Index available for everyone. We are also planning how to represent it. We encourage you to try, all you need is a scale, products and time to upload your data!

Related info

The presentation we used in the workshop.

List to data resources on Life Cycle Analysis and waste management: http://bit.ly/lcawastedata

Related posts: Weighing a scale

You can find  about the workshop on Dietmar’s website or at Guggenheimlab one.

A series of open seminars on the infrastructure development of the Stockholm region are planned as part of the Orientation Course Stockholm on the Move organised by KTH, with invited guests, international experts and representatives from local stakeholders. Stockholm on the Move will also be an exhibition at the art and architecture institution Färgfabriken in the autumn 2012 where among other things the result from the work in the orientation course will be presented.

The seminars will consist of a series of thematically focused lectures that discuss future infrastructure and urban development from diverse perspectives and scales. Each day will consist of three to four lectures: by local stakeholders and two invited international guests. The days will have the following themes:

August 29: regional scale, large-scale projects and the effect on the city

August 30: bottom up approaches, the dynamic relation between infrastructure and the city.

August 31: technical aspects of infrastructures in the urban environment.”

In this symposium we will talk about Low Cost Cities and self-made neighborhoods.

Place: Färgfabriken (Lövholmsbrinken 1, Liljeholmen).
Time: Thursday August 30, 15.30 – 18.00.
Status: Open seminar, compulsory for students attending courses A52O1A and A42O1A.

Join in as we collaboratively confront our own trash by dismantling and analyzing individual pieces of locally sourced products and trash with the help of scales, databases, and waste-management data.

More info on the hashtag in Twitter: #dissectwaste

The workshop is a collaboration with Dietmar Offenhuber.

We all think we know what our waste looks like, but, in fact, a large part of it is invisible. Uncover and visualize the hidden processes and consequences associated with individual waste objects. Consider an apple, which apparently has no waste at all. However, if we count the bag in which we carry it home, the paper towel that we use to dry it, and the crate that is used to store and transport it, the footprint of that consumable item is much greater than it seems. Join in as we collaboratively confront our own trash by dismantling and analyzing individual pieces of locally sourced trash with the help of scales, barcode readers, open-source databases, and waste-management data.

July 1st and 2nd 3rd and 4th we will be at Ard al-Liwa, a place where the formal and the informal city meet.
July 6th and 7th we will be at Midan Fan, Down Town Square (center) in El Cairo.

There will be a whole week of events and actions starting with an open hearing to present the project at the Town House, where we have been doing all the designs  and constructions during the first two weeks.

The event will take place Saturday July 6th at 19h. Omar Nagati, architect and partner in the project will be joining Basurama

Organize: Elnamla, cultural association

Finance: Embassy of Spain in Egypt

We will be working in Town House Gallery, in collaboration with the zabbaleen comunity (informal trash pickers), local artisans and theatre companies.

One week for designing
One week for building
One week for performing

Colaborators

Elnamla: cultural association from Cairo
Omar Nagati: architect
Town House Gallery: contemporary Egyptian and foreign art

Funded by

Embassy of Spain in Egypt

Is it that possible?
We can try…
What do we need?

Basurama lecture.
March 19th, 2012 at 6.00 pm in the ALH (Architecture Lecture Hall) Dar Al-Handassah Architecture Building