Mifactori: Transforming Street-Waste into Circular Building Bricks For Living Rooms

Hi,

this is a Challenge for Berlin by Mifactori.

UPDATE: There is now a better DOCUMENTATION (Meta Level) for this kind of experiments/activities.

#Starting Point
In Berlin Neukölln a lot of people put their old furniture on the street. As garbage.

img “Sperrmüll” by 3268zauber, CC-BY-Sa

We run a design and construction start up called Mifactori. In Mifactori we have the Hiebo Design Series – dedicated to develop Open Source Circular Design objects.

We work a lot with screws and modularity by applying simple grids of 3cm x 3cm for screws to the parts or using the similar 4cm x 4cm grid of Open Structures.

From a Hiebo Design tutorial

Open Structures Grid, img by Lukas Wegwerth, CC-BY-SA

#The Challenge
We will go through the streets of Neukölln and collect old furniture items. Then back at the venue we will clean the stuff and drill holes in it apply the 3cm x 3cm or 4cm x 4cm grid. Transforming the stuff into some kind of reusable Meccano. :slight_smile:

Meccano, by Jorge Royan, CC-BY-SA

And we will build furniture that way that we will then donate to the CRCRL lab in Berlin.

Of course we will document everything properly and brainstorm a way to make the techniques we use, test and develop well known in Neukölln. So that more and more people start to pick up the stuff from the streets and transform it into circular solutions :sunny:

We will look for sponsors (for screws) to help us to create the challenge.

More Info Soon


UPDATE: If you speak german. @rhizom and I sold this as a workshop for kids to Neukölln. So we will already test the idea in March. Here is our workshop description. Feel free to copy it.

Zirkulärer Sperrmüll - Young Arts Neukölln - Muchina Zimmermann.pdf (1.2 MB)

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I see our brains work the same. I have been wondering a lot lately what one could do with this trash. In particular mattresses the #1 garbage in Neukölln.

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jeap, but mattresses are still tricky. You can’t drill holes in them :slight_smile:

And they are not easy to clean.

jup. Intuitively I’d think one would need to take them apart (shred?) the mattresses to make them useful material for anything.

jeap, maybe for insulation of houses (heat/cold protection).

We should find out, what happens to mattresses the usual way. You know, when a hospital closes down for example or buys 1000 new ones. Maybe sometimes the old ones do not get thrown away but are recycled. Maybe @sharmarval or @TechnicalNature know something or how to find out?

Hospital mattresses need to be incinerated as it is treated as toxic waste (due to risks of infection etc.). At least this is the case in the UK! This is an interesting project from the @RSAGreatRecovery

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A nice overview of a London based specialist in Mattress recycling (and reuse if of a decent quality) - http://www.matt-uk.co.uk/recycling-process/

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UPDATE: If you speak german. @rhizom and I sold this as a workshop for kids to Neukölln. So we will already test the idea in March. Here is our workshop description. Feel free to copy it.

Zirkulärer Sperrmüll - Young Arts Neukölln - Muchina Zimmermann.pdf (1.2 MB)

Update: We made the workshop.

###Here is a full documentation of it on the Mifactori Website

And here is a related Blogpost with learnings.

Teaser:

full documentation

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here is some experiments I’ve seen at the intersection of Elbestrasse and Weserstr.
It seems people used waste from the street to build some urban furniture… (sorry for bad photo quality)

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Started to use the 3x3 grid for the http://community.oscedays.org/t/workshop-cyceloo-iteration on 13.6.2016 during OSCEdays Berlin

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We condensed the experiences we made into a new concept.

The goal of our next hackathon/workshop will be to build flowers - a whole flower bed.

People will produce their own 3erlin Grid parts and assemble flowers and reassemble flowers of others.

Therefore they can really let their imagination go. And they don’t have to think about practicability or stability and so on. But they will produce a big family of interesting parts. We can then use to think about practical things :slight_smile:

Description in german here.

test builds

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