Hiroshi pointed me to this BusinessWeek investigation on microchip counterfeiting, which explains how electronic waste recycling is profitable: used circuit boards are baked over coal fires to loosen precious microchips. These are rinsed in the local river and sorted according to manufacturer. The chips can be re-sold as is, or their markings can be sanded […]
Category Archives: supply chain
chip chop shops
Also posted in environment, fabrication, materials, traceability, upcycling
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design it yourself
Enzo Mari‘s 1974 Autoprogettazioni (Design and build-it-yourself projects) are simple schemes for tables and chairs that can be made from scrap wood in a variety of proportions and configurations. You can follow the designs or even buy complete kits, but you don’t have to: just looking at these images allows the designs to be freely […]
Also posted in fabrication, free & open, furniture, open objects, product design
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material extinction
Earth’s Natural Wealth: an Audit explores the depletion of exotic materials necessary for manufacturing high-tech products through a series of intense infographics. The lesson is that some of our most desirable elements (Indium for LCD screens, Gallium for lasers and LEDs) are set to become completely extinct with ten or twenty years with no substitute […]
Also posted in environment, fabrication, materials, upcycling, visualization
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lap sack
HP announced it would start shipping laptops in reusable cloth bags instead of the usual cardboard boxes, a step toward reducing materials that have nowhere to go but away. via
Also posted in energy, environment, fabrication, futurecraft, materials, product design, soft/glowing
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black tin 2
Tin Mining In Bangka Island – Click here for this week’s top video clips I’ve talked about the devastation that illegal tin mining has wrought on the island of Bangka (Indonesia), and while preparing my talk for the Nightmarket 2008 workshop I came across this video which gives us a glimpse into the squalid conditions […]
Also posted in conviviality, environment, fabrication, materials
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being wrong
Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles is a remarkable feat for a fashion company: a visualization of their products’ global supply chains on a map, along with videos of each step in the manufacturing process, and descriptions of each item in terms of distance traveled, CO2 emissions, waste generated and energy consumption. Not only is it impressive that […]
Also posted in blogogracy, fabrication, fashion, free & open, futurecraft, marketing, materials, open objects, product design, traceability, visualization
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yousmoke
Transparency is a noble pursuit in this age of business2.0, and we’ve seen companies like Chumby and TCHO benefit from free press and a boosted brand identity in exchange for posting their entire process on-line for all to see. So what happens when a company that makes bad products still practices transparently? Flickr introduced me […]
Also posted in furniture, futurecraft, livingbreathing, possessed products, traceability
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under the catwalk
I received this slide show purporting to document labor conditions in an Indian shoe manufacturer for a brand called Catwalk – although it’s hard for me to confirm any of this information. If you know about it, let me know, otherwise these are still pictures of people at work producing remarkably polished products in slave-like […]
Also posted in fabrication, fashion, possessed products
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