Waste but not wasted

Superuse: meet the Dutch architects transforming the world with waste | Art and design | guardian.co.uk: "The slender aluminium trolleys – some of 5,000 made redundant by KLM when they recently updated their design – house a wunderkammer of case study projects, drawn from Superuse's work, as well as projects produced by students at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where the architects also teach. In the words of Jongert, the projects are about "identifying and connecting available flows in the urban ecosystem". He sees production as an organic cycle of streams, which are too often separated. By bringing together mutual inefficiencies – aligning surplus with demand, waste with need – the work looks to develop a more integrated world of products and services."
One trolley tells the story of GRO Holland, an initiative that recycles coffee grounds as a growth substrate for mushrooms. "98.8 percent of coffee is wasted in the process of making it," says Jongert, explaining how waste grounds are now collected from a network of cafes, mixed with oyster mushroom spores and packed into perforated plastic bags, then hung in a humid warehouse. The harvested fungi are sold back to the cafes, and the waste substrate passed on to nearby tulip farmers to reuse.