Auteur : Thomas Thwaites
Where do our things really come from? China is the most common answer,
but Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to know more. In The Toaster
Project, Thwaites asks what lies behind the smooth buttons on a mobile
phone or the cushioned soles of running sneakers. What is involved in
extracting and processing materials? To answer these questions, Thwaites
set out to construct, from scratch, one of the most commonplace
appliances in our kitchens today: a toaster. The Toaster Project takes
the reader on Thwaites s journey from dismantling the cheapest toaster
he can find in London to researching how to smelt metal in a
fifteenth-century treatise. His incisive restrictions all parts of the
toaster must be made from scratch and Thwaites had to make the toaster
himself made his task difficult, but not impossible. It took nine months
and cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store. In the
end, Thwaites reveals the true ingredients in the products we use every
day. Most interesting is not the final creation but the lesson learned.
The Toaster Project helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our
cheap consumer culture and the ridiculousness of churning out millions
of toasters and other products at the expense of the environment. If
products were designed more efficiently, with fewer parts that are
easier to recycle, we would end up with objects that last longer and we
would generate less waste altogether.