Sabine Oberhuber - ®turntoo

Summary presentation Sabine Oberhuber, D-Day Tuesday 25 October

Sabine begins with sketching a picture of the dire situation we’re in with our raw materials stock. In 22,5 years, for example, we’ll have run out of silver. It is important to think about ways to save our resources or to reuse raw materials.

To elucidate these issues, she enters more deeply into the Cradle2Cradle philosophy, which distinguishes a natural and a technical cycle. The technical cycle involves the use of resources that we own only for a short time. The architectural practice of Rau Architects, from which TurnToo arose, sees buildings as materials banks. In the future, we must work towards purchasing services instead of buildings or products: you do not buy a washing machine but a washing service. We therefore do not own anything, but we use the product/building/machine until it has to be replaced by a better, newer version. This is because the latter aspect is nowadays taking place at a high rate: product life cycles are getting increasingly shorter. Consumers do not pay for raw materials anymore but only for the performance.

The idea behind TurnToo is to connect the ‘technical nutrient circle’ and the ‘performance use cycle’. This new circular economy should create interesting business models in which products are repaired or replaced while the manufacturer/owner remains responsible for the raw materials. For designers this means that products/machines should be modular so that parts – materials in fact – can easily be separated afterwards.

TurnToo was nominated for the Herman Wijffels Innovation Prize.

Sabine works at Turntoo. The main purpose of this company, founded by RAU architects, is to shape the process of recycling of materials.

Design Coffee: Tuesday, October 25