#Circular

[endocathexis]

Iris photography, source: irisphoto.art

[thesaurushouseofdesign]

David & Gladys Wright House,

Phoenix’s Arcadia neighborhood, Arizona, United States,

Built between 1950 and 1952, the circular concrete-block house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright designed the house, which he originally called "How to Live in the Southwest," for his son, David, and daughter-in-law, Gladys, as a place where they could spend the rest of their lives admiring the Camelback Mountain vista.

[daisyslippers]

Oil and water on top of a string of pearls

Susan Wilkinson

[beancrafts]

Round

[blackpointgame]

[marejadilla]

Ian Cumberland, “Black Hole”, 2016, oil on linen. B. 1983, Banbridge, Co. Down, Ireland.

[futureselfbeats]

DAY 935 - TYPO

IG: @futureselfbeats

[toyastales]

Life is like a circle.

[jigsawjo]

2012-12-06, 500, “Untitled”

Bill Martin

Missing: 5

[arc-hus]

Chapel Santa Maria Degli Angeli, Mount Tamaro, Switzerland - Mario Botta

[cognitivejustice]

To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year. 

Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.

Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.

“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”

[fruitiermetrostation]

Rounder Iconpack (42 icons)

[abstracteddistractions]

Robert Delaunay, "Circular Forms (Formes circulaires)," 1930,

Oil on canvas, 50 3/4 x 76 3/4 inches (128.9 x 194.9 cm)

Courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

[solarpunkbusiness]

Italian company converts discarded fishing nets into chairs, car mats and Prada bags

Since 2009, Giulio Bonazzi, the son of a small textile producer in northern Italy, has been working on a solution: an efficient recycling process for nylon. As CEO and chairman of a company called Aquafil, Bonazzi is turning the fibers from fishing nets – and old carpets – into new threads for car mats, Adidas bikinis, environmentally friendly carpets and Prada bags.

For Bonazzi, shifting to recycled nylon was a question of survival for the family business. His parents founded a textile company in 1959 in a garage in Verona, Italy. Fifteen years later, they started Aquafil to produce nylon for making raincoats, an enterprise that led to factories on three continents. But before the turn of the century, cheap products from Asia flooded the market and destroyed Europe’s textile production. When Bonazzi had finished his business studies and prepared to take over the family company, he wondered how he could produce nylon, which is usually produced from petrochemicals, in a way that was both successful and ecologically sustainable.

The question led him on an intellectual journey as he read influential books by activists such as world-renowned marine biologist Sylvia Earle and got to know Michael Braungart, who helped develop the Cradle-to-Cradle ethos of a circular economy. But the challenges of applying these ideologies to his family business were steep. Although fishing nets have become a mainstay of environmental fashion ads—and giants like Dupont and BASF have made breakthroughs in recycling nylon—no one had been able to scale up these efforts.

For ten years, Bonazzi tinkered with ideas for a proprietary recycling process. “It’s incredibly difficult because these products are not made to be recycled,” Bonazzi says. One complication is the variety of materials used in older carpets. “They are made to be beautiful, to last, to be useful. We vastly underestimated the difficulty when we started.”

Soon it became clear to Bonazzi that he needed to change the entire production process. He found a way to disintegrate old fibers with heat and pull new strings from the discarded fishing nets and carpets. In 2022, his company Aquafil produced more than 45,000 tons of Econyl, which is 100% recycled nylon, from discarded waste.

More than half of Aquafil’s recyclate is from used goods. According to the company, the recycling saves 90 percent of the CO2 emissions compared to the production of conventional nylon. That amounts to saving 57,100 tons of CO2 equivalents for every 10,000 tons of Econyl produced.

Bonazzi collects fishing nets from all over the world, including Norway and Chile—which have the world’s largest salmon productions—in addition to the Mediterranean, Turkey, India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and New Zealand. He counts the government leadership of Seychelles as his most recent client; the island has prohibited ships from throwing away their fishing nets, creating the demand for a reliable recycler. With nearly 3,000 employees, Aquafil operates almost 40 collection and production sites in a dozen countries, including four collection sites for old carpets in the U.S., located in California and Arizona.

[adelle-ein]

dads will truly go anything except go to therapy