DESIGN FICTION: Throw-Away Bottle
DESIGN FICTION: THROW-AWAY BOTTLE
Edinburgh, 2045
When Isuelt Morgan finished the interview she took a sip of water from her bottle. Then she casually threw it into the sea.
The camera was still rolling. Because cameras don't not roll. They are always on.
So she must have known that she would be seen. She was caught red-handed. This torchbearer of environmentalism. This preacher of plastic doom hadn't just acted out a hypocrisy. She had flaunted it. And done so in a most disgusting fashion.
It was an act that broadcast contempt for the ocean. Why not throw it away in the boat? Why not just leave it lying around? Why actively discard it? Seeking out the sea as a litter bin.
-- -- --
The Streams stitched it together with other acts of violent disregard for nature.
One caught the heartstrings and disgust-core of the digital horde. A scene from an old television series from the 2010s, Mad Men. The series had captured the imaginations of the literati of the era in particular who wanted to feel what it was like to be amongst those powerful ad men of the 1960s. What was it like to live in a time of great, hopeful change and to be the ones at its forefront? A time when America was youthful and booming. A time when the hyper-verbal were on top, and the number-crunchers and autists were confined to the back office. It painted a rosy veneer of that American dream and paired it with a painting showing the dark capitalist underbelly that went along for the ride. One scene was particularly galling.
The Drapers are out for a lovely, 1960s, picturesque Sunday picnic. Everything about the scene is a billboard for a hopeful America. And then, it's time to leave.
The family get up, take up their blanket, picnic basket and children. And discard a pile of rubbish in the grass. Unfathomable, un-reasonable. An act of awfulness to those of us living in a newer, wiser Overton Window. The scene appalled the audience in 2008. It seems laughable to us today. Too unrealistic to treat with contempt.
Now Iseult Morgan fit perfectly into that scene. There was no difference. Except perhaps that unlike the Drapers, Iseult was supposed to know better. She was, afterall, fond of lecturing us about the our many eco-destroying behaviours.
Things moved quickly.
Within 20 mins of going viral, there was uproar and outrage. A little after that major questions were being asked by funding agencies, sponsors and venture capitalists.
Iseult couldn't be contacted, as she was on a retreat. Imbibing ayahuasca as part of a mother-earth ritual deep in the Costa Rican rainforest.
So they revoked her funding in absentia. And smeared her holy image until there was nothing left to salvage.
Iseult emerged from her psychoactive retreat in a state of post-clarity bliss. She was not prepared for the raging firestorm of public fury. But she was well-placed to take it well. Clear-eyed; hungover but calmly so.
A camera shoved in her blissful face left her quietly stunned. But not distressed. Perhaps she didn't' yet grasp the gravity of the affair.
"Why do you feel that it's right for you lecture the world on environmentalism and then treat the ocean as your own personal waste-basket? Are you not ashamed of yourself?"
A blink.
"Surely you, Iseult, should know better than to litter?"
Silence.
"What were you doing throwing that bottle in the ocean? Where you trying to spark outrage?"
And realisation dawns. Ripples of recognition illuminate her face.
"Ah. I see."
"Well, do you have nothing to say? Why would you do this? When so many follow you and depend on your leadership?"
A pause. A smile. Some modesty, a little embarrassment.
That bottle was an Active Compost bottle. It's designed to degrade naturally.
"Sounds like an excuse. But even biodegradable plastics take time to degrade, they pollute the seas and ecosystems in those times. And they are an eyesore."
I agree. Active Compost is not a biodegradable plastic. It is a mould-hardened dormant algae. When left in salt water, the bottle decomposes and the akinetes germinate into new active cells. It's not a bioplastic; it's food. Its purpose is to be thrown away.
"What?"
It is better for the environment to throw this in the ocean, than to recycle it, reuse it, landfill it, incinerate. It's food first, a bottle second.
"But the energy needed to manufacture or transport, surely it would be better to simply grow algae and leave it to the ocean itself?"
It would but the blue-green algae is a waste product from biofuel. And blue-green algae is in short supply in the High North Atlantic. And to inject huge, concentrated amounts into the ocean would be counterproductive.
These bottles are designed to be gently distributed on demand. Little islands of Cyanobacteria allow little clusters of zooplankton to gather and grow. In turn, they feed the marine food web.
-- -- --
When the explanation was verified there were a lot of embarrassed faces. But the damage had been done to Iseult Morgan and to NutraSpiral Foods and to PlasticWar. Some of that funding was not coming back.
But the publicity the AquaBloom Flask received may have been worth it.
-- -- --
Of course, today, that's why we throw our rubbish away. Unlike the inefficient energy-wasters of the past.
Our waste feeds the Earth.
Their waste killed it.