Apr. 02

Designing Waste: Strategies for a Zero Waste City by Clare Miflin

Date
April 2, 2020
Time
12 PM – 1 PM
Location
Dolphin Design Center
Zoom
100 Dolphin St, Baltimore, MD 21217
Cost
Free
Tags

This week’s lunchtime lecture will take place at its usual time but will be online, on Zoom, instead of our usual venue. There will be the usual announcements, introduction, lecture followed by a Q/A session. To join the lecture: Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/6102194421 (Meeting ID: 610 219 4421) Clare Mifflin is an architect and systems thinker with over 25 years of experience designing buildings to Passive House, LEED Platinum, Living Building Challenge and AIA COTE Top Ten standards. While acknowledging the importance of rigorous metrics, she knows that inspiration, intuition, and vision also have a vital role to play if humanity is to thrive. Clare led the development of the AIANY Zero Waste Design Guidelines and is setting up a nonprofit Center for Zero Waste Design to further their reach. She has also founded a consultancy –ThinkWoven – to develop strategies to weave urban systems into ecosystems. Clare is Co-chair of the AIANY’s Committee on the Environment; a board member of Biomimicry NYC, and Sustainability Coordinator for her local food cooperative. Waste is a design flaw: in packaging, in products and in buildings and cities. Ecosystems recycle materials indefinitely in circular loops, but the human-designed system discards over 90% of the materials extracted from the earth within six months. The Zero Waste Design Guidelines address the crucial role of design in transforming our city, along with its systems and citizens, to reach zero waste. Today’s architects routinely strive to reduce embodied and ongoing energy and water usage in their designs. Similarly, they should design their buildings to reduce the ongoing waste that’s generated and managed within them, as well as the waste from the construc­tion and demolition process itself. Design can compel us all to change our behavior and consump­tion patterns so we reduce, share, reuse and assign space for managing discards so they too can be reused or recycled. (Be sure to check out zerowastedesign.org )