Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Monday, December 22, 2003Harebrained Schemes
There's an idea for an experiment that has been nagging at the back of my mind for a few years. One could call it an experiment in networked 'dysconstruction', to borrow a term from the book Bolo'Bolo.
Some years ago I wrote an article for the LUF organization on daily life on the Aquarius marine colony proposed by Marshal Savage in the book The Millennial Project. A key feature of the colony infrastructure was the use of a Personal Package Transport system, integrated with the colony Personal Rapid Transit system using automated shuttle vehicles. A chronic problem for Aquarius, it has often been suggested, is the lack of manpower as the population of the colony, while large, would not have a vast lower class population on whose backs the 'less important' or 'undesirable' forms of work common on land could be dumped. Those activities would thus tend to compel the use of automation or the re-structuring of daily life in such a way as to preclude them in the first place. This, of course, is a key rationale for a PPT system. The PPT obsolesces conventional forms of product marketing, elaborate packaging, and distribution, eliminating much material waste and the need for masses of poorly paid people doing mind-numbing retail work. People would shop on-line and the items they purchased would be delivered automatically to their home within a few minutes.
To facilitate this, I suggested that Aquarius' domestic manufacturers would employ the use of a set of standardized reusable containers whose form factor was designed for the use of the PPT system. Likewise, purchasing agents buying imported goods from elsewhere in the world would compel some of their suppliers to use -at least for bulk goods- this same packaging, rather than the usual wasteful types of packaging. This would also be important as a way to eliminate the vast amount of trash associated with these more primitive forms of packaging which, of course, has an energy cost to the colony to dispose of. I imagined the standardized packaging of goods on Aquarius to be based on the use of a set of nesting containers working up to the maximum PPT unit shipping container size -something about one meter cubed- or the standard ISO marine containers. The containers would be made of highly durable material like metal, high density polyethylene, ceramic and glass -the latter two being the easiest for Aquarius to make. (since it could 'farm' lithophoric algae to provide the materials for them) They would be both recyclable -when they wore out- and directly reusable -which is more efficient that recycling. Instead of labels they would feature some kind of insert so that small removable labels for their contents would be simply attached or inserted.
I also imagined that this could be used to facilitate the use of automated food processors -one of which was supposedly in development when I wrote that. The robotic food processors would use food ingredients in consoles of modular containers to cook meals. Imagine a bread-maker taken to its logical conclusion. Linked up to the PPT, this would allow one's kitchen to automatically stock up on foods as they ran out. One could have food 'subscriptions' where commonly used food ingredients would be supplied continuously to the food processor at a flat monthly or yearly fee -or maybe even free according to the supply of what was produced on Aquarius itself.
Ever since I wrote about that I've been thinking about the power of the idea of standardized reusable containers for packaging everything without the horrendous waste of conventional packaging. Being an MCS sufferer, I tend to buy most of what I need by mail order. I've even planned for the eventuality of buying all my food supplies by mail-order, a concession to the remote location I must soon move to for sake of a clean environment. I don't have a lot of space and I live in a town where the recycling program is deliberately engineered to be as inconvenient as possible. So when I get stuff by mail order I tend to be very annoyed with the unnecessary packaging that comes with it. When you don't do a whole lot of store shopping, you start to really understand how stupid and inconvenient packaging is. So I wondered if there was some simple way one could educate the world at large about the virtue of this idea of standardized reusable packaging and from this thought came the idea for this experiment.
Imagine starting a barter network based on the use of a single kind of standardized durable container. For the sake of argument, let's say this is a thick walled glass container with a rectangular form factor but with rounded corners. It has a wide roughly rectangular lid but in a couple different types, one kind for simple bulk goods and one with a pouring spout for liquids. Maybe this lid attaches in the manner of a mason jar lid with a wire clamp lock. On one side of the container there's a kind of formed-in picture-frame into which a card can be inserted as a label. Or if that's too difficult to make, maybe a pair of grooves which hold a label on with elastic or wire. Or maybe we can make removable adhesive-less labels out of vinyl that sticks to the smooth glass surface, like those window decals for cars, and can be put through a computer printer. The container is fashioned to be very durable, designed with the idea that it can be reused hundreds or thousands of times and shipped in the mail or by UPS as-is without additional packaging around it. Different makers of the containers might include their own personal fabricator's logo for vanity's sake stamped/molded into the glass -much as with some makers of early reusable bottles or the makers of glass floats.
This barter network has a simple rule; you can trade anything _you_make_or_salvage_yourself_ and can package in this standard container, or the empty container itself can be a trade item. You have to work out values on a trade-by-trade basis but the container is the standard packaging unit -though one might use only a partially filled container or multiple containers. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be a 'bulk material' item -things like dry or liquid foodstuffs. It's anything you can fit inside these containers, perhaps with some other filler as protection. So it could be as simple as some quantity of home-grown dried herbs or something as sophisticated as a finished circuit board, a toy, or a piece of jewelry. Note the mention of items 'salvaged'. You don't want people going to the store and buying stuff to put in the container. But if it's left-overs of something one has purchased that's OK. Lets say someone got a big box of nails and had some amount of them left over. Likewise, if one salvaged something useful from what was originally a commercial product or industrial waste -wire fished out of a computer company dumpster, nuts and bolts from a junk yard, aluminum shavings, etc. Even the broken remains of these containers could be put into other containers for them to be returned to their manufacturer.
The initiator of this network would, logically, be the first people to start making these containers, which would be their primary item of trade. For everyone else, they have to think about what things they can make/find and put into them. People could be as serious or as playful about this as they wish. Maybe some people would seriously try to get as much as their daily needs as possible in trade this way. Others might only be looking at this as a kind of performance art and wouldn't be very concerned about the 'value' of the things they trade. Maybe the only 'trade' going on is for communication, people just using these containers as a reusable shipping package to exchange mail. Maybe the container itself becomes a kind of ingredient of an item -like the proverbial model ship in a bottle or cake-in-a-jar. Or maybe it gets re-applied as part of some industry; used as a container for farming as with mushroom farming, sprout farming, or indoor crayfish farming. It doesn't matter. What matters is the adoption of this container as a standard packaging medium in a money-less network of exchange.
Now, there are some technical details to be worked out here, chiefly the pros and cons of various designs of container and materials for it. Is only one container adequate or is it necessary to have a few different types for different kinds of material? You absolutely don't want different containers for every kind of item. That defeats the purpose. Single-function containers are a dead-end. That's why we don't have reusable soda bottles anymore. They got brand-specific in design. So if multiple containers were used they should be limited to a very small assortment with large diversity of use. Initially, one would want to stick to just one container even if it limits some uses. The size should be large enough to hold a great variety of things in useful amounts but small enough that making, handling, and shipping them does not become unwieldy. I think something with a 3-5 liter capacity seems about right. Are there any off-the-shelf containers which could be repurposed to this project? I favor glass because it's fabrication is pretty low-tech, it's pretty tough, it is easy to clean and sterilize, is non-toxic (even polyethylene leaches), and thus suitable for food stuffs which are likely to be the most popular item to trade. But glass containers still take a fair amount of energy and skill to make and a rectangular form container is likely to need a molded glass technique requiring metal molds. Ceramic containers can be easier to fabricate but have the disadvantage of being opaque, may cost more, are more brittle, and are not recyclable unless one can employ more high-tech ceramic mixtures like ceramicrete. But then, the key idea here is reusability as a better alternative to recyclability. If a container has a life-span of a thousand exchanges, that's not bad even if it's not recyclable.
Altogether, I think this would be an interesting experiment. It might go nowhere or it might become a global fad. Even if it failed, the containers would be likely to become collectors items just because of the idea associated with them. Either way, it would get those participating thinking about the waste they generate as consumers and about their individual potential for industry.
