4. Case Studies
Inspire Recycle are a Kingston University partnership focussing on the area of recycling and design innovation. Paul Micklethwaite and the team there have written numerous papers on the UK scene, some of which they feature on their website:
http://www.inspirerecycle.org
These focus on the success stories and best practice case studies. They highlight the necessity for changing conventional attitudes on recycled products. For example:
‘People sometimes assume that recycled products will be poor quality or expensive. These negative perceptions will be challenged if attractive, functional and affordable recycled products are explicitly promoted and marketed as ‘recycled’ (2006).
To conclude this section, Manzini (2006) comes up with an abstract view of the aesthetics of recycling as complex links between human beings and the products they own. The problem as he sees it, is to amend the purely technical and organisational connotation which characterises today’s activities of separating, collecting and processing discarded products and bringing them out of the:
‘dark corner of our cultural universe whose industrial society hunts down anything that smacks of garbage and tries to hide it’.
3. New Thinking