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Sort It Out: The Industrial Cooperative as a Model for Filtering and Revaluing Waste

Part 2 Project 2022
Hadley James Clarke
University of Cambridge | UK
At a time where the circular economy is primarily thought of through business model adaptations, the Industrial Cooperative provides an alternative future, one that extends circular principles beyond businesses, and utilises spatial thinking across multiple scales to offer new habits and rituals surrounding disposal.

By way of intervention, the council-owned Industrial Cooperative designs, develops and manages specific architectural typologies rooted in industrial estates. These necessary sequences of spaces act as a filter for constant and contingent waste streams, allowing maximum value to be recognised and realised as resource streams. Through spaces of human value-identification in the initial sorting dock, to automated storage in the vertical material banks. Each step of this new system plays a fundamental and practical role in saving waste from becoming obsolete by navigating it to the time and space in which it is deemed most valuable. The Industrial cooperative is therefore a model, acting as a bridge between waste streams and the industrial workers able to extract value from them. One that is implemented here in the London Borough of Enfield but one that demonstrates the potential of a spatial implementation of the circular economy in wider urban industrial landscapes.

Hadley James Clarke

Tutor(s)

2022
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