Sustainability Efforts
Goals
Same old goals. Reduce stress on waste management and recycling infrastructure, protect our planet, oceans, waterways, wildlife, etc. More than "saving the planet" or even helping secure humanity's future, we should do this because it is the humane thing to do. We created the problem, we have to fix it.
Solar
Disorient camp at Burning Man is aiming to use 95% renewable energy by 2027. We have been working on solar solutions for Geodesic Temple with our friends at Black Rock Labs since 2017.
CoSign "D", on D22's frontage, was entirely powered by a solar array provided by Black Rock Labs.
Mixed plastic recycling
After all these years and all these words, we are shockingly still in the Stone Age of plastic recycling. A long-term solution demands that we break the table-to-landfill cycle and weave plastic recycling deep into our lives by turning it into a habit, a ritual.
1. Keep it simple.
1.1. Use what's readily available. Recycling process does not require water, chemicals, additives, adhesives, or fillers. Ultimately, it should not require electricity but we will probably use some electricity at the beginning to jumpstart the process.
1.2. No sorting, cleaning or pre-processing. We need to find ways to make recycling entertaining and intellectually rewarding, in other words, we need to amplify the feel-good factor. Plastic recycling should be as easy as possible hence no sorting, cleaning or pre-processing. There are arguments for pre-processing but at our stage of recycling (remember, we're at the Stone Age) we just need to keep it as simple as possible to get started. We can get fancy later.
2. On-site, on-scale and self-reliant. Moving trash around is a big part of the pollution problem. Ironically, current recycling strategies involve polluting the air further y shipping huge amounts of trash around the planet. Plastic to be recycled by Disorient is not moved to another facility across the playa or across the planet. It is reconfigured on site with a solution tailored to our problem.
3. Distributed. Based on #2, the solution should be open-source and easily replicable by other individuals/camps/communities. We are not aiming for an industrial solution. We need to address the problem where it happens: everyone's backyard. Stay small, distribute widely.
To have a better chance to reduce our plastic waste we need to make plastic recycling needs to become easy, hyper-local and sexy.
We plan to use a plastic chipper which reduces plastic to little chips and a brick compressor which compresses the plastic chips into bricks similar to this one or that one to create bricks following this example.
Plastic chipper at the Museum of Space Available, Bali, Indonesia:
Plastic chipper and brick compressor at Monsieur Spoon in Pererenan, Bali, Indonesia:
We would like to use solar heat to melt or at least soften the plastic chips to help the brick-making compressing process.
We plan to bring a plastic chipper and a brick compressor to the playa. If you know of a camp that uses them please let us know. We would love to learn from/with them.
Our goal is not only to become self-reliant when it comes to plastic recycling by doing this recycling on-site (immediacy) but also to start using the resulting plastic bricks (and possibly other objects) as a component of our art installations. None of this is new. What's new is to actually make it happen.
Disorient Unplugged
Further exploring sustainable options, Disorient Unplugged is a new type of Disorient event that requires no electricity. Removing electricity from Disorient is a challenge that forces us to re-interpret fundamental aspects of Disorient.
Our first Disorient Unplugged event was Disorient presents: BURNING MANTAP in Bali in 2021.
