Will young scholars, creatives, engineers or designers be the ones to save the world from becoming one big dump that covers and overlooks human unhappiness?
Maybe not, but judging by the initiatives that every now and then come to our attention, they might be the only resource.
For example, the story of two Swiss designers, Fabian Engel and Simon Oschwald, graduates of the University of the Arts in Zurich, is intertwined with the poverty of many Kenyans and the serious problem of plastic pollution in the capital Nairobi.
Dandora is one of the largest landfills in Africa. Square kilometers of garbage, hills of plastic, metals, objects of all kinds and hundreds of "waste pickers", the collectors who sort the garbage and resell it to those who reuse it.
The two Swiss creatives thought about how at the same time, by recycling plastic, they could help the poor people of degraded places such as the slums of Nairobi and eventually came up with low-cost prosthetics, to help the millions of people in less developed countries who need them due to road accidents, poor medical care or armed conflict and cannot afford them. They chose to use this post-consumer plastic to manufacture the Circleg, reducing the cost So they decided to reuse locally available plastic waste for manufacturing. The recycled plastic is reinforced with fiberglass to increase stability.
Oschwald and Engel took a trip to Kenya to learn more about current recycling processes and to observe the lifestyle needs of their potential users.
"This user-centered approach allowed us to integrate the needs and requirements of stakeholders into the design process," the designers explained. "Next, we designed and developed a prosthetic solution tailored to the Kenyan context, with the added value of reducing the country's environmental impact.
So they created "Project Circleg," a Swiss-African company that creates sustainable, high-quality prosthetics built from recycled and processed waste.
"Today, only 1 in 10 people have access to appropriate assistive products, including prosthetics," says the World Health Organization. "Without access to such products, many individuals in need are confined to their homes and live dependent and excluded lives, increasing the impact of impairment and disability on the individual, family and society.