Our NYU Shanghai Re-Makerspace is a place where people gather, share knowledge, and work collaboratively with the purpose of reducing waste and looking into sustainable and innovative solutions to minimize the deterioration of the environment in China. This new space for NYU Shanghai provides equipment, tools and space to support our Re-Made in China course, workshops, and lectures. The Re-Makerspace fosters hands-on learning towards the creation of a variety of artifacts that were exhibited in the art gallery on the 12th floor, as well as at the End-of-Semester Show organized by IMA and Visual Arts. Internally, our goal has been to educate NYU students, faculty, and staff to develop awareness of environmental issues, at the same time advocate responsible practices in an effort to modify attitudes and behavior.

Externally, our mission has been to foster community outreach and collaborative relationships with various institutions in China, aiming to empower people by informing them on ways they can make a difference, along with promoting impactful community projects and sustainable local business ideas.

At the end of the spring semester of 2019 we were given a room on the 8th floor at IMA to create the Re-Makerspace. During the summer we did some construction on it to be able to have a safe place to work. Construction included a hood to extract odors from heating plastics, extension of a pipeline to connect the hood to the ventilation system of the building, and change of two windows to let us open and close them improving the ventilation of the space. 

Heating Plastics

We also changed our kitchen oven for a lab oven, which is sealed, allows us to regulate the temperature in a better way, and keeps the odor away from us. This worked much better than our previous oven. We also finished building our shredder and we supplied our space with some other useful tools and equipment like a blender, hydraulic press, pots, masks, etc.

Events

Besides building and equipping our space, we hosted a series of events, including workshops, exhibitions, a movie screening, talks, a panel discussion, and a beach clean up. Through all these events we had the opportunity to know more and collaborate with several organizations such as Green Initiatives, Collective Responsibility, Precious Plastic Shanghai, Bagamoyo Beach Lovers(Tanzania), NYU Abu Dhabi, and others.

Courses

A lot of our events were supporting the course Re-Made in China, however all of them were open to the NYU Shanghai community.  In this class, students investigate how local communities in China manage their waste, and explore innovative ways to transform discarded materials or products around us into something new and precious in areas such as art, graphic and industrial design, architecture, fashion, textiles, etc,. They also experimented with organic-based plastic alternatives.

Some activities that we didn’t include in the previous poster, because they were planned later the semester are two workshops. One with high school students from Moonshot Academy (Beijing) and another one with a group of people from Weifang-Jiedao community, which is our neighborhood in Pudong. The school and the Chinese community came to meet our space, see what we do, and learn from us. For the Chinese community, we ran a workshop together with Professor Jing Chai from our Chinese Language Department. In this workshop we also invited NYU Shanghai students to learn about recycling plastic bags, get involved with the community, and practice Chinese language skills. The people of the community sent representatives to learn how to make coin purses with plastic bags and irons, so they can teach other community members later. It was incredible to see the craft skills of these ladies, especially what they do recycling pantyhose. They offered to teach us this technique next semester and we are looking forward to learning from them too!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5SfvgAHRqh/

Another highlight this semester was an amazing panel discussion we had with Jayne Goh, Heather Kaye, and Xenia Sidorenko, who are transforming the fashion and clothing industry by leading the way to more eco-responsible business practices.⁣

⁣Jayne Goh is the co-founder of P.E.T. – Plastic Ecological Transformation which supplies eco-friendly polyester textiles (made from plastic bottles) to manufacturers of items such as T-shirts and uniforms. ⁣

⁣Heather Kaye is the co-founder of Finch and loopswim. With partner Itee Soni, they are dedicated to making eco-friendly designed clothing and swimwear from recycled plastic bottles.⁣

⁣Xenia Sidorenko, founder of usedem, upcycles discarded jeans to make bags. Her overall eco-friendly project has a socially engaged component in that she gives hands-on workshops to share her knowledge – teaching participants how to transform their own recycled textiles.⁣

We look forward to continue developing our Re-Makerspace next semester, we have in mind two more machines to get. Furthermore, we are excited to keep learning, collaborating, and sharing our experiences with diverse communities in Shanghai and abroad gathering new information regarding initiatives, projects, technology and possibilities for making our campus more sustainable.

More information can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/preciousplasticnyush/