“Waste = Food” is a fantastic documentary, perfect for incorporating into course curriculum as a visual aid to inspire fashion design students to think critically about ‘waste.’

Outline:

Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet.

A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution.

 • Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource.

 • Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment.

Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun­gart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption.”

Director Rob van Hattum

Research Gijs Meijer Swantee

Production Karin Spiegel en Madeleine Somer

Editors in Chief Doke Romeijn en Frank Wiering

© VPRO

Source: Google and Tegenlicht

Mary F Hanlon

Mary has a PhD in Sociology from University of Edinburgh, researching responsible fashion and transnational labour rights activism in the wake of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh.