A street level intervention for micro waste streams designed for urban precincts
Could this fuel the future of micro material resource recycling through decentralised material collection and education hubs?
If you’ve met us at Cirque du Soil, you know we are constantly coming up with project ideas and solutions derived from our everyday interactions with businesses and residents.
In May 2024, Founder and Architect trained Jean Darling and Philip Cen, a final year student from Melbourne School of Design, designed a new urban installation project which advocates for place based, street level interventions, through a regenerative design framework, conscious consumption and local government circular economy goals for 2030.
Each competing project bid had 4 minutes each to pitch at Fishermans Bend’s Digital Innovation Challenge’s Pitch night, which suffice to say was tricky to express all of the above in a rapid fire format!
We’ve now finished the animation above (now live) that aims to explain the key concepts of the Mia Mias project further.
Our project collaborates with Victorian Circular startups and enterprises, maker spaces, upcyclers, and a newly formed technical and Design For Disassembly (DfD) advisory liaison team to create MIA MIAS MICRO MATERIALS BANK (MMMMB), a pilot mobile public infrastructure initiative for urban sites to facilitate microrecycling, targeting the ‘left behind’ material streams beyond the 2030 4 bin system, council recycling depots and current recycling infrastructure, driving the transition towards a circular, regenerative economy.
The 4 core design pillars shape the Mia Mias Micro Materials Bank project are:
- Data: Measuring and tracking meaningful data around micro waste streams and community engagement impact.
- Collections: Collecting the left behind micro waste streams (materials needed for local upcyclers which currently are not collected at scale)
- Education: Public education on building awareness around conscious consumption and what products can be made, by local producers
- Urban Infrastructure: Repurposing and salvaging construction waste to build rather than new, linear materials.
While the above sounds like a wildly ambitious project with a number of moving parts, we’re also incredibly lucky to have formalized 2 specific advisory teams around the core areas of the Mia Mias Micro material bank: a Tech/AI advisory team and a Design to Disassemble Advisory team, with the following project partners that will come onboard to support this project, if successfully funded.
Tech to AI Advisory team:
Together with Matthew O’Brien, Steve Marshall, Marcel Herz and Scott Bennett, this forms our tech advisory team.
Design for Disassembly Construction waste advisory team:
- Construction reuse expert Rob Neville from Revival projects
- Nancy Ji from Melbourne School of Design
- Claudio Torres Salazar from Ephemeral Studio
Our project beneficiary and partner:
Kym O’ Shannassy and Mat Card from Rethink Recycling Coop for their industry insights and tireless dedication to the plastic waste crisis through plastic bottle caps (our chosen first left behind micro material stream), and who have been making our super cool upcycled plastic bucket stands so people can stop bending over our compost buckets!
With that, the project is well covered on all bases and ready to go on a regenerative journey of building an urban infrastructure prototype that aims to serve both people and planet, with the singular goal of keeping those (damn) micro materials out of our soils and waterways, to recirculate within our local communities.
Thanking the City of Melbourne Digital Innovation, FBIdeas and City labs teams for their input and consideration of our proposal.
Animation credit to the fabulous Reece Sanders www.rsdm.com.au.
Photo credits for Fishermans Bend Digital Innovation Challenge Pitch Night by Long Story Short and the City of Melbourne.
Vote for Mia Mias Micro Material Bank here to see it come alive in Fishermans Bend 2024-2025.
Voting closes 11.59pm Thursday 29 August AEST.
