Need to Know
27 : 10 : 22

Eindhoven – WORK.CARE.WORK is a platform that helps people balance professional work and informal care. The digital service acts as the middle man between informal care-givers who are also employed by a professional organisation and their HR department.

The socialisation of care has been in progress for many years as formal healthcare systems struggle to keep up with an ageing population. The concept of care-munities has also been accelerating, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, as those outside of traditional care-giving roles such as friends, neighbours and local communities looked after those in need.

While WORK.CARE.WORK is now in beta phase, the aim is to launch it imminently given these rising pressures. The system has undergone an intensive design assessment involving employers and HR personnel. The final iteration of the platform contains digestible information about informal care to ensure all parties are aware of the logistics involved, and a selection of tools to support the dialogue between the informal care-giver and employer in finding a workable balance between work and care tasks.

For more on how micro-societies of Decentralised Care are coming to the fore, read our Neo-collectivism macrotrend.

Eindhoven – Artificial Greenhouse is a design research project exploring a sustainable future for digital and artificial nature using technology.

Created by design duo WhitenNoiseDADA and graphic design studio De Vormforensen for Dutch Design Week 2022, the greenhouse is a three-part project, one of which – Nature as Property – examines the role of ownership and capitalism through vegetables and plants. Many seeds are patented and owned by a handful of companies, namely Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. Challenging this, Nature as Property provides an artificial intelligence (AI) programme that digitally cross-breeds over 1,000 artificial flowers. These new species are then protected by a non-fungible token (NFT) code, which people can own and look after, democratising access to new species.

By creating digital species that anyone has the right to own, the project invites viewers to question who owns nature, and what obligation society has to protect and conserve natural assets. As society starts to discover and fund the use of new technologies that enable more sustainable practices, the stage is set for researchers and governments to use digitisation in new and innovative ways.

To discover how to harness technology in a way that benefits people and the planet, read our Digital Conservation microtrend.

US – Greenpeace USA has published a report detailing the decrease in plastic recycling rates, flying in the face of the popular narrative. The report found global plastic waste is expected to nearly triple by 2060, while recycling rates in the US have declined from their peak in 2014, falling from 9.5% to only 5–6% in 2021. While companies encourage consumers to recycle, there is a gap between expectation and reality. Only two out of the seven commonly used types are widely accepted in waste centres across the US.

The study concludes that most types of packaging require sorting facilities that are not available in most waste centres, deeming most plastics economically impossible to sort – and suggests that this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, virgin plastic is cheaper to produce, leaving recycled plastics a less economical option.

Greenpeace calls for companies to begin implementing sustainability goals, and to set targets for 50% re-usable packaging by 2030. Explore more innovations in this area in our Re-usable Packaging Market.