For all industrial
designers it is important to know how certain things are made, so that they can
utilise this knowledge and apply it to their designs. The series of videos of “how
it is made” explains the process of how different packaging is made from the
raw material and the processes it must go through to achieve the final product.
These packaging includes cardboard boxes, packaging tubes, tetrapak, aluminium cans,
plastic bottles/jars and glass bottles. These video are a good resource for
industrial designers to find out how certain things are made and are easy to
understand and gather information from. They give designers a quick and easy
method to learn about a production process that might be relevant to their current
project and gives them an insight on what happens during the production of different
packaging materials.
There is also a video on
recycling and how these packaging products are recycled and what happens to our
other general waste. This video is also
a good resource for industrial designers because they can see how their
packaging products are recycled and what is not recycled. It also shows how general
waste is discarded after no longer needed and also that there are some benefits
from land fill and general waste. After watching this video I found that my
ideas for assignment have been tweaked because of the waste that the human race
discards and the amount of rubbish we throw out.
The series “giving packaging new life” also is very informative
and a good resource for industrial designers. It gives a brief over view of the
recycling process of consumer products and packaging. In the series it
expresses six main types of packaging materials that designers use around the
world. Similar to the recycling video in ‘how it is made’ it goes through the
process of how products and packaging are sorted once thrown away and then the
process of how the materials are recycled and turned into new material. After watching
this series of videos I found that some of my initial material choices for
assignment were not the best. Now I can safely choose a material that I know
will be able to be fully recycled and reused leaving a less environmental foot prints.
It was interesting to learn for the videos that some of
these recycled materials are used for a total different application then
firstly used. Such as the plastic and aluminium in tetrapaks are used for
cement which I a totally different application than firstly used for, glass bottles
are required to be separated by their colour when being recycled because
different colours are recycled differently and that plastic packaging used to
be incinerated or sent to landfill before people started to recycle plastic
products and packaging.
The most interesting video of the series was the final video
on the future of recycling and sorting. This video showed the first fully
automatic sorting plant which was built in Hannover, Germany. This machine
consists of a large sieve drum which separates most of the waste based on the
size and shape characteristics. To separate metal objects a large magnet is
passed over the top and the waste, all metal waste clings on the the magnet and
is taken to a separate area. I found it interesting that this machine uses
large washing drums to separate paper from the waste.
As an industrial designer I would be knowledgeable to watch
these two series because it show both how different packaging is made, how we
recycle our old packaging and products and how we can use this recycled product
to create new things and keep an sustainable system of waste rather than moving
everything to land fill. We also learn that new innovations in recycling such
as the automatic sorting plant in Germany will help our world deal with human
waste and its ever growing number and the draw from countries doing the right
thing (such as Germany)when it comes to recycling and waste.
