Over the rainbow: Sharing a cross-disciplinary philosophy of waste through spectrum visualisation

Waste is a material problem and a cultural condition. Many philosophies and visualisation resources exist for addressing waste such as waste hierarchies and circular economy diagrams. These diagrams, however, are not always enough to represent the intrinsic complexities related to waste systems or the interactions that exist between current and potential interventions. In this paper we contribute an original framework for understanding waste and propose a visualisation of waste as a spectrum of possibilities rather than as a series of discrete, disconnected interventions. The Waste Rainbow invites users to “plot” interventions and to think about these interventions and their relationships with the system on multiple stages of the life of an object.