Waste is a natural process, a pervasive material, an invaluable resource; a crucial element in the way human society views, orders, and designs its spaces. The issue of waste is a modern urban invention and a controversial topic for both global culture and urban ecology, and stems from the consumptive habits of modern society and the throwaway culture that promotes the disposability of products. The assumption that the product is more important than the materials that make it up is particularly prevalent in complex everyday items such as electrical and electronic equipment. The waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) stream is the fastest growing waste stream in the world. These complex products, made mostly of glass, plastic and metal, but also of valuable resources such as rare earth metals are destined to be landfilled and if lucky, to enter the recycling loop. Ironically, recycling, a waste practise touted as "the" solution to the waste problem regardlessly encourages consumptive habits and ultimately supports the interests of the same system that creates the waste problem. On the other hand, the issue of urban waste arises from the processes of contemporary urbanisation, economic change and rapid population growth, and spans technical, environmental, social, economic, and political layers. Agglomeration of problems across the layers of waste ecologies results in delays in their spatial synchronisation and waste ecology produces waste landscapes, which are the infrastructures of waste streams and their consequential landscapes.
The municipal waste stream is not the largest; however, it generates the most waste landscapes in the city and therefore an important issue for urban life. London has long joined the global attempts at transforming "take-make-waste" habits and the linear, fixed, closed systems into flexible, complex, circular ones. However, the delay in transforming the monofunctional structures of industrial waste processes into circular multifunctional infrastructures of resource recovery still results in vast, polluted sites of accumulated urban waste. Waste collection, treatment and disposal processes continue to be harmful to the environment. Waste landscapes remain industrial in structure and image, seen as disruption to urban life, and therefore, appear as a strange non-city fabric. The metropolis continues to rely on waste landscapes, producing even more of them and pretending to contribute to the socio-environmental condition of the city.
The research aims to find ways to catalyse an interception in urban waste ecology and generate alternative pathways for material flows in the city. The results of the graduation project prove that waste materials can be reclaimed within the city by linking waste flows with other urban flows and generating opportunities for waste landscapes with new programmes and values. As a proof concept, this coupling is realised for WEEE stream and collaborative work spaces of arts, crafts, and technology, which illustrates a creativity-based alternative to materials recovery in the city.