Circularity: An Idea Driven By Hands
Organization: Suan Tian Stories
Photographer: Lillygol Sedaghat
Organization: Suan Tian Stories
Exhibit Title: Circularity: An Idea Driven By Hands
Location: Taiwan
From the view of Taiwan's circular village, the first apartment block made from recycled materials, a new building is constructed in the distance using traditional construction methods.
According to the UN, we have 7 years to change our behavior to limit climate change catastrophe. The key to this change is circular economy (CE), an environmental-economic model that maximizes the life cycle of resources to minimize waste through green design, production, sustainable consumption,reuse and repair. It’s a system overhaul. But few people know what it is, limiting its potential to mitigate the effects of climate change.
My project hopes to transform CE from an academic concept to a series of photographs, making it visible, understandable, and accessible for people to understand how systems work and where they can make a difference.
Taiwan will be my focus—an island where 98% of its energy and 70% of its food is imported, Taiwan has embraced a circular economy with 148 initiatives, where both its people and its businesses are looking to share resources and minimize waste.
As an explorer, I use multimedia storytelling to visualize the circular economy, highlighting the invisible systems and the important people who determine where our waste goes, what happens to it, and what it has the potential to become.
We currently live in a world where our business models and our mentality reflect a more linear way of being and doing--we take things from the earth, use them, and then dispose of them in a linear fashion. And this manner of doing things has severe consequences for our planet and for our future, resulting in excessive waste, deterioration, and general unhappiness
Circularity provides an answer both economically and environmentally. It is a system that designs out waste, cycling biological and technical (man-made) materials, so that at every stage of their life, they are recaptured, reused, and fulfill a new purpose.
It is regenerative, meaning what we take from the earth ultimately ends up going back to it and re-nourishing it. It is circular because every output can become an input for something else, increasing resource efficiency and creating natural collaborations between businesses, and among people and society at large.
Everyone and everything places a part in this larger ecosystem, giving everyone and everything purpose and a place.
Lillygol Sedaghat Email: lillygol.sedaghat@gmail.com
Taiwan Cellphone: 0907-674-640
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