This week, editor Chieri Higa is thinking about sustainability. Keep reading for questions like: When should we build things to last? And, how can spatial design help frame new visions for food futures?  

Photo: Welinna

These bioplastic stools by Crafting Plastics will last as long as your conventional plastic stool – that is, until you're ready to dispose of it. Industrial compost will return it to the soil in four months.

Building things to last – or not

For the upcoming issue of FRAME Magazine, I profiled a studio called Crafting Plastics – a bioplastics innovator and design team that works to make objects that last the amount of time they need, fully composting at the end of their use. This got me thinking about other material innovations that aim to improve on the ones we conventionally use. According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, cement manufacturing alone accounts for a whopping 8% of all carbon dioxide emissions (compared to energy use from homes, businesses and transport, which add up to a combined 55%.) That means innovations that make building materials less carbon-intensive could make a huge dent in global emissions.

Reefcycle has pioneered a bio-based cement that could have an impact on the construction industry.

Some, like the startup Reefcycle, have developed cement made with the use of plant enzymes, promising reef and coastline restoration – and eventually buildings – with much less environmental impact than with conventional cement. Others might look to  ancient materials like Roman concrete, which reinforces itself, getting stronger over time instead of crumbling like its less durable conventional counterpart. Whether durability or compostability is the answer, of course, depends on how you plan to apply it.

systems-based change, or a return to the grassroots?

‘We ruined it, now we have to fix it,’ is a phrase that often comes up in some form or the other in calls for climate action. If the climate action isn’t thought through, though, it has the potential to make things way worse. Take for example the case of the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. After turning reclaimed land into a nature reserve in the 1980s, the stewards of the area introduced large grazing animals similar to those that may have roamed northern Europe in the ice age, attempting to ‘rewild’ the area, effectively returning it to nature.

The fatal flaw of this experiment, well intentioned as it is, was that with an area that was completely fenced in and a lack of apex predators, the population would balloon during the spring and summers only to collapse during harsh winters. Thousands of animals starved to death or had to be culled by hunters as recently as 2018. Rewilding is a practice advocated by journalists such as George Monbiot as well, who postulates that if rewild all farmland and switch to food manufactured in mega-factories, all of the protein required by the world population could be produced on a piece of land the size of greater London.

RAD+ar's prototype chicken coop shows how communal small-scale agriculture might create local solutions for food waste while also bringing communities together.

This is quite an extreme idea, but also seductive when the future of food production seems at odds with the survival of our species given the limited resources of our planet. Could there be a middle ground? The architecture studio RAD+ar presents one such vision in its Chicken Hero Pavilion. Concealed within a hill, a chicken coop runs on food scraps from nearby restaurants, converting food waste into compost and fresh eggs. Hyper-local interventions like this could provide community-based solutions to problems like food waste with less negative impact on the land compared to large-scale industrial farms. Recreating ice age ecosystems is a mammoth task, but making smaller neighbourhood changes can have positive and meaningful ripple effects, too.