Nakadai Inc. is a company that bills and prides itself as a "general waste recycle center". Eleven tons of waste are carried into the "center" every day. Calculated in 500ml plastic bottles, that would be about 22,000 bottles. In addition to that, the company buys fifty tons of separated garbage. In order to be recyclable, unseparated garbage has to be separated and disassembled first, before it can enter the recycle/reuse path together with the already separated materials. This is what is done at Nakadai, where waste is generally regarded as "material".

 

The materials brought in include fluorescent lamps, scrap metal, wood, plastic, paper, office equipment, electronic parts, packaging materials, glass plates, GPS sensors, metal bats, ball-pen caps, stuffed toys, etc… Mention any mass-produced fixture or furniture, and chances are you'll find it at Nakadai. There are used goods, but also brand new ones that companies clear out for inventory adjustment between fiscal terms. Dirty pieces of plastic or paper that are unusable as raw material are being recycled in the form of fuel. For several years, equipment and furnishing-related waste seem to be dramatically decreasing, and the person in charge at Nakadai experiences first-hand the hollowing-out of the industry, lamenting that "there is almost no capital investment for domestic production."

 

Nakadai Sumiyuki, head of the company’s Maebashi branch, claims with a grin, "I never bought any equipment!" He regularly contributes the "Nakadai’s Industrial Waste Diaries" (Japanese only) to the "jiku" website run by the "AXIS" design magazine. The information and statements quoted above are taken from this column and the Nakadai website respectively, so that "person in charge" is in fact none other than Nakadai Sumiyuki himself. What is yet to be published in the "Diaries" is that there is an increased supply of home electric appliances that cannot be sold as new because their cardboard packaging suffered water damage caused by the tsunami, as Mr. Nakadai told me. In most cases, the actual products are perfectly in order. An air purifier that regularly costs 20,000-30,000 yen can be bought at Nakadai for only around 8,000 yen.

 

At Nakadai, "waste is being separated and disassembled to such an extent that it becomes attractive even for designers" (Nakadai Sumiyuki), and apparently more and more designers and architects are coming to look for materials recently. On September 23, a quite unique event took place at Tama Art University’s Kaminoge campus, where designers, architects, artists and students made new products out of a total of ten tons of industrial waste. The event was aptly called "Industrial Waste Summit" (or "Sanpai Summit" in Japanese).

 

The floor of the venue was covered with panels of detergent packages that a misprint had rendered useless. Placed on that "carpet" were chairs covered with car airbag fabric, an installation-like bench built from office chair legs, bags made of used tent fabric, and other items. There also were pieces of furniture (?) and art (?) made from materials the original purpose of which was impossible to guess for the general public. What particularly caught my eye was an array of colorful objects made with LAN cables, such as lampshades, stools, dustbins, and even a human-shaped sculpture (mannequin?). They seemed a little loose and would need some reinforcement, but otherwise I think these products could definitely be commercialized.

 

"I thought we may get some synergistically interesting results by combining social materials and digital fabrication methods," explains Kubota Akihiro, professor at the co-hosting Department of Information Design, Tama Art University. The "social materials" here are the same "materials" — namely waste — that Nakadai works with, while "digital fabrication" refers to all fabrication techniques involving IT equipment, such as 3-D scanners and printers, cutting machines or digital sewing machines. As hardware is getting significantly cheaper these days, digital fabrication on an individual level has begun to trigger the creation of new communities, and in addition, it may even pave the way into a postindustrial age. Kubota Akihiro is one of the founding members of FabLab Japan (RealCities 037; Japanese only), and he is eager to uncover the great potential hidden in a combination of both.

 

"Nakadai Inc. is getting four 10-ton trucks' worth of material every day. It works like the Tsukiji market, in that there is a flow of goods but no stock. Also regarding the idea that resources are shared assets of the community, both Nakadai’s approach and that of FabLab have some things in common. Personal materials will become social materials, and personal fabrication is going to turn into social fabrication."

 

According to Kubota, this idea is not necessarily inspired by ecological thinking, and it isn't a movement that was started as a trend against mass-production and consumption either.

 

"Rather than a matter of ecology, it’s a sub-loop that exists in harmony with mass-production. There is always unused material left in any production process, for example the clipped-out parts when punching holes into a material. It’s about utilizing such parts, so it is not anti mass-production."

 

A slightly modified version of the "Industrial Waste Summit" took place between late October and early November under the title "Nakadai Nishiazabu Factory", and it is very likely that similar events are going to be organized in the future. If movements like those of Nakadai and FabLab increase, hook up and expand, our daily routine surrounded and almost crushed by all sorts of things may start to change little by little. Hating things and throwing them away is not the method by which this can be achieved. It’s more about being fond of things, and finding new usage and re-usage for them. Radioactive waste aside, we will have to live with mountains of waste, and considering this, it surely sounds like a very appropriate method.

 

(November 09, 2011)