Recently, at one of the events forming part of the Circular Economy series events organised by @arcgitectscan , one of the speakers mentioned urban mining.
Urban mining consists essentially in seeing the value in repurposing discarded materials to be found in our cities.
The old saying goes "one man's rubbish is another man's treasure", and of course this is not only something that emerging economies have been doing forever but something my grandmother's generation would simply call aprovechar (repurpose)
Unfortunately, at some point during my childhood, adults were told that if they wanted to succeed, they needed to be more productive and to do so, they needed to free up their time by introducing "convenience" in their lives. This changed the world.
In my case, not that we ever drank many fizzy drinks, my earliest memory of the impact this had is when Coca-Cola swapped their slim, beautifully designed, and reusable glass bottles (one had to return to the local bar ) for ugly tabby plastic ones.
From then on, packaging became part of our lives, and repairing went out of fashion... Even in a family as frugal and conscious as mine was.
Now, many years later, we contemplate the size of the mountain of rubbish that has formed and rush to seek solutions.
And I wonder... Are we ready to find real solutions? to say goodbye to that "convenience"? To incorporate jumpers in our winter loungewear? To own less?
And more importantly, do we have the skills to do so?
