Sustainability, when the horizon is circular
- Javier Díez
- Jan 23
- 10 min read
Guest designer: Javier Díez, los díez.
This blog has been previously published in El Asombrario & Co.
I am a self-confessed and proud follower of Susan Sontag's thesis that one of the qualities that excites and motivates me is intelligence, so I do not intend to waste my time writing it, nor rob my potential readers of it, a text dedicated to such a colossal demonstration of human stupidity.
I would, however, like to present in it an example of what we could call 'collective intelligence', which is none other than the challenge of sustainability, that project in which it is irrefutably demonstrated that the strength of the community lies in each of the individual actions, however minimal and apparently inane they may seem, and which could perhaps lead us to conceive of the horizon mentioned in the headline not as circular, but as spherical, a perfect visual metaphor of the global ideology that must, or should, be implied in such a project.
I must confess that I am not a specialist on the subject, simply a user and consumer moderately informed, quite critical, but above all concerned about the future of the grandchildren of my friends; therefore, in this article I do not intend to question, of course, the global principles of sustainability of the planet and its inhabitants but to question certain messages and formulations that are perceived as mere advertising slogans and therefore assumed without any critical sense, which can trivialize, neutralize and jeopardize the ultimate objectives of this aspiration.
Of course, I believe in the need for recycling and in the need for the products that arise from it to be recyclable, I believe in a circular economy that manages to minimize the extractive need for raw materials, I believe in the need for the use of electric transport vehicles and in the use of clothing in harmony with the habitat, so what I would like to do here is to warn against those messages that seem to come out of a marketing and advertising consultancy and not from scientific, rational and measured analysis of reality and its needs, and that perceived as mere instruments of the mercantilist system could cause the failure of the non-negotiable and peremptory objectives of our society, and that, if they are perceived as mere instruments of the mercantilist system, they could cause the failure of the non-negotiable and peremptory objectives of our society.
I would like to begin by looking back - not with a nostalgic but with a pragmatic view - remembering and to a certain extent paying homage to trades and attitudes of the past of which we may have a disdainful and marginal vision but which, updated by suggestive advertising campaigns, seem to us the most novel and which lead us to adopt them happily without any qualms; I am referring to activities such as scrap metal dealers and ragpickers - immediate antecedents of recycling and 'clean points' - or cobblers, tinsmiths, tailors and repair shops that functioned as a forerunner of two terms so in vogue today, repair and reuse; all those activities and occupations were inscribed in poor contexts and societies, or perhaps, to be more precise, we should say with restricted resources, and in which we should surely look at ourselves to come to understand -from a modest vision- that our small planet is not as rich as we have been told by a predatory economic and productive system, or that it is not as rich as the efforts and requirements to which we submit it, and that the resources it can offer us are not unlimited as we were sold until recently.
Let us now analyze some of these formulations that, if taken without being critically evaluated -understood intelligently, not necessarily in a negative way- can do more harm than good to the cause of sustainability, starting with the issue of the 'circular economy'. Let us begin by analyzing the formalization that the new productive economy seems to have assumed.
If up to now the industrial economy had adopted a linear scheme which, in a simplified way, began with the extraction of raw materials, passed through their transformation into consumer goods and culminated with the death of the product, either because of its obsolescence -now programmed- or the overcoming -fictitious and artificial- of its performance, nowadays the mercantilist system has evolved -as if it were a living organism adapting to its environment- until adopting an idyllic circular, eternal and perfect form; In search of a metaphor with metaphysical overtones, we could say that until now the industrial product died but now it is reincarnated.
It is this circle that seems to have neither beginning nor end, in which we can place in diametrically opposed points the concepts of recyclable and recycled, which in its cyclical and harmonic movement can make us enter into a state of hypnotic unconsciousness that would lead us to think that the consumption inscribed in it is totally innocuous, without collateral effects or consequences outside of it; However, looking for a simile in the mechanistic models, we have to realize that this movement will necessarily have a friction with the surrounding world of which it is a part, making its efficiency not optimal, causing a wear of the materials that make it up and that this wear is transformed in turn into pollution; as Richard Buckminster Fuller already maintained: “Pollution is nothing but resources that we are wasting”.
The danger that we may run lies in perceiving and assimilating this virtuous circle as that of consumption without side effects, without collateral damage, leading us to use and consume without a certain degree of critical awareness or collective responsibility, until it becomes vicious.
The fact of perceiving in the product only its environmental quality - let's imagine that it is recycled, recyclable and that its carbon, water and chemical footprints are optimal - can lead us to overlook - blinded by its eco-label - its utilitarian or functional qualities, to ask ourselves if we really need this object or service to become part of our material and experiential universe, of that system of objects that Baudrillard spoke of, which surrounds us in our daily lives.
I am not talking about consuming with a guilty conscience, but about adopting a critical position -based on information- towards consumption; perhaps we do not need more and better as it would seem to be the ideal formulation, but less and better; allowing me to make a very personal contribution from my perspective as a product designer, I have always thought that the world needs much more design but much less designed things.
Returning to the formalization of this panacea that the circular economy has become, I would like to propose a mechanism that would surely make this cyclical formulation more efficient.
The same would consist in enlarging the diameter of the circle, or what is the same, trying that the imaginary distance between the two opposite points marked on the dial as 'recycled' and 'recyclable' is the maximum, although similar results could be observed by the procedure of slowing down its speed of rotation; This can be achieved by making the material goods that become part of our lives to remain in them as long as possible, avoiding, for example, compulsive purchases of objects that we get tired of and discard with the same speed with which we clicked on the screen and the same speed with which the seller sent them to us, or by resorting to the usual repair and reuse, or recovering, although it sounds obsolete, the habit of inheriting.
Can't a product that is not exactly a paragon of environmental virtues, but whose useful life, due to its intrinsic material and design qualities and the quality of its manufacture, is extended by 50, 60 or 100 years, be more sustainable, passing through the hands of different owners, from parents to children or from one user to another?
A clear example of how temporality affects sustainability would be fashion.
It has always seemed to me that the concept of 'sustainable fashion' is an example of an anthological oxymoron, where it is complicated -not to say impossible, and even hypocritical- to try to reconcile coherently the usual cycles of the industry, with the usual spring-summer and autumn-winter collections -not to mention the aberrant and vertiginous cycles with which we tend to work nowadays- with environmentally friendly cycles; if we understand fashion as a mechanism of cyclical and constant formulation and phagocytization of trends -and with them of materials and energies- we could not find a term conceptually more distant from that of sustainability.
And this field allows me to reiterate the fundamental thesis of this article, that is, to try to unmask those mechanisms that apparently promote sustainability but are rather the result of the marketing department of savage neoliberalism; Thus, the rise of platforms for the sale of second-hand clothes, which of course fits perfectly in this reuse, surely promotes in many buyers and let's say primary buyers, to make compulsive purchases of garments and accessories knowing and having unconsciously internalized that they can give them a second life by selling them on the Internet, thus discharging their supposed consumer guilt; In addition, the clothes that enter this circuit may not exceed one or two sales on these platforms due to the generally poor quality or planned obsolescence intrinsic hallmark of fashion.
Why not, for example, start using the concept of sustainable clothing that projects your products over time, overcoming the time barrier of fashions and trends?
On this particular subject I recommend the book La moda justa by Marta D. Riezu, whose reading at times provoked in me feelings of guilt for going through life dressed.
Another case where we are repeatedly sold the environmental benefits of a product until we have internalized them is that of the electric car, which, with the new age mantra of its environmental purity, can make us use it without the burden of conscience that I call upon the critical consumer.
A first point would be that what the electric car really does not do is pollute, that is, emit harmful substances into the atmosphere thanks to the use of rechargeable batteries compared to traditional internal combustion engines; But even this would not be one hundred percent true because part of the pollution of vehicles is due to the wear of the tires in their friction with the asphalt, something that a car, motorcycle or electric scooter can not avoid until it is achieved that this friction is equal to zero, for example by moving on air cushions or magnetic fields.
Accepting in part that the electric vehicle does not pollute, can we be sure that it does not pollute or, in other words, that the energy needed to recharge its batteries comes entirely from renewable sources?
And finally -having obviated the entire manufacturing process- comes the moment of scrapping; do we know, because it has been explained to us, that the disassembly of the battery of an electric vehicle is more complex and potentially much more polluting if it is not carried out with the appropriate technical means, means that the economic and technical conditions of many countries do not have?
I repeat my thesis once again; I do not doubt the need to replace the internal combustion engine vehicles by cars, motorcycles, scooters or any other electric gadget, but let's make the use of the latter a measured and necessary act; What do we get by using the car, even if it is electric, to make a journey that we could have comfortably done on foot enjoying the '15 minutes city'? What do we think, that once seated at the wheel of one of these vehicles we are going to speed through the suspiciously empty streets proposed to us by that factory of dreams that is advertising, leaving behind us a current of clean and pure air?
Up to this point we have been talking about products, fixtures and fittings, materials, manufacturing processes, transportation and disassembly, but not even the ethereal universe of the Internet can elude our criticism.
Actions as seemingly innocuous as moving our finger across a polished screen or clicking our mouse are not innocent acts. Think of the enormous amounts of energy needed to keep cool the industrial buildings that house the servers - euphemistically baptized as 'the cloud' - where all the information, images and sounds that we naively think constitute our being and form part of our life are stored and that the only thing they do is turn us into subjects of a new feudal state, that 'telepolis' governed by the 'lords of the air' that Javier Echevarría spoke of back in 1999.
Or let's think about the chain of actions, transport of materials and products, consumption of raw materials and energy, emission of pollutants, etc. that we set in motion with that innocent click that almost without thinking has led us to buy something that until a few moments ago we did not know we needed, for the benefit of e-commerce, making us forget concepts such as proximity trade, seasonal products, Km 0 suppliers...
Finally, let us note that this term, that of sustainability, carries a distress signal launched in unison by the planet and the human being, although this nexus of dependence that usually links the Earth to man is fallacious, since the real dependence is only in a unidirectional sense, of the latter with respect to the former, and that the former would be -endowed with an animistic nature that it surely possesses- really happy if we disappeared from any of its horizons and left it alone; surely it would be able to bear it.
Javier Díez
Industrial designer by the Escuela Experimental de Diseño (Madrid, 1992) and member of the studio los díez, together with his brother José Luis, dedicated to product design and, since 2010, also to the creation of visual poetry and object poems.
Since 2020 he collaborates as an article writer for the digital magazine “El Asombrario & Co.”; in February 2022 he published a compilation of his articles in different media entitled OBJETIVO SUBJETIVO [Logbook of strange times], texts, expanded and updated. He is currently preparing a second publication on design, art and aesthetics, entitled “Sobre ideas y cosas” [On Ideas and Things], and a volume on the filmography of Billy Wilder.
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