3.1 Analysis of Social Context and Resulting Design Criteria 3.2 Analysis of Challenge and Resulting Design Criteria 3.3 Summary of Design Criteria
2.1 Analysis of Social Context and Resulting Design
Criteria The goal of the waste for life project was to develop a design of a foldable chair that could be used by the co-operatives in Buenos Aires to ultimately increase their standard of living. These cooperatives represent members of the Buenos Aires population that have teamed together and earn a living by processing waste materials available to them into products that are desirable and can be sold. The role of the chair is simple. It will be used in every day lifestyle to sit on or help aid in other tasks and can be dismantled easily to be able to store it in the minimal space provided. The Chair is made up of Plastic, which is reused. Such as plastic bags and plastic caps which are both layered together in anpiece of machinery called a hot press, which processes the waste materials into a composite material through a high temperature and pressure environment. This composite material created has properties, which are more desirable and can be manufactured into products that can be sold. Due to the limitation in accessible resources and skills there are a number of restrictions on the design of the chair. As mentioned earlier, it has to be able to be constructed with materials readily available to the co-operatives and has to be able to be assembled by the members of the co-operatives. From this the chair apparatus must be simple to construct. 7.3 Social Context Analysis In order to design a chair that will be of most use to the cartoneros, their social context must be thoroughly researched and understood. The most relevant areas to consider are the cartoneros safety, skills, resources, and financial context. In addition, ethics as described by Engineers Australias Code of Ethics must be considered and incorporated in the all tasks. Analysing these areas is fundamental to establishing a suitable design criterion. . A stakeholder analysis was completed by Team D to correctly identify who would be affected by the project and what these effects would be. The main groups of the community affected by this project include: The Government, CEAMSE , the green peace and the MTE. As this would help control the zero waste law by the green peace, by giving an opportunity to decrease the number of cartoneros in the landfills looking for waste. This would decrease the waste and help the country environmentally and economically.
CEAMSE and the government would have a decrease in profit as
they hire cartoneros organisations to sort the waste, if this no longer exist they would have to hire private organisations and this would cost them much more because the cartoneros are under payed anyway. The Product will help give cartoneros to be more financially independent and would affect their lifestyle greatly in positive manner. As less cartoneros would work in landfills, the Zero Garbage Law would start working and Green peace would in come in domination. This would affect CEAMSE and the local government greatly, as they operate the landfills and control the cartoneros majorly. This would give other stakeholders a chance to emerge and benefit the country in different areas and minimise government corruption. To minimize unexpected consequence or social impacts to the community of Buenos Aires, the team identified some of the most common social impact problems that a project can have on a community. Three of the most expected of these include social domination, exploitation and hierarchy evolution. (7.4.1 Domination). Domination refers directly to CEAMSE controlling the private sector in Argentina and handling the distribution of business to locals. This is a direct issue in which members of the community socially dominate other members. Cooperative cartoneros working with Waste for Life should have the right to a safe working environment and hence their context with regards to safety training must be analysed. Many cartoneros were previously employed in a variety of occupational areas before Argentinas economic collapse, which means that many may be unfamiliar with standard workplace safety practices. (Buenos Aires Design Brief 2014) Cartoneros may be exposed to hazards with the introduction of a hot press and should be properly trained to use it safely to avoid injury. In addition, the design should incorporate as many safety aspects as practical to reduce risk. Integrating safety in a design is an ethical responsibility of engineers. Since some cartoneros are inexperienced in manual labour, ease of operation is also an important aspect. Income earned through the cooperation with Waste for Life is minimal. The majority of this income is spent on necessities and there is unlikely to be much money remaining for buying equipment to help with their job. This is an important part of the cartoneros social context and has numerous design implications associated with it. Any maintenance or replacement of broken parts should be inexpensive to buy and the overall cost making a chair and using
the hot press should be minimised. Availability of replacement parts
is less of an issue since, due to globalisation, components such as bolts and bearings of the hot press are standardised around the world and readily available at relevant retailers. Directly related to their financial context is their lack of building materials, having only access to disposed objects that are obtained through the recycling of trash. The range of materials available is large but may be unreliable or hard to find. Ideally, as many components of the design should be replaceable or substitutable by recyclable materials Furthermore, the use of electricity is undesired since the cost would be taken directly out of the income of the cartoneros. A large amount of electricity is necessary to operate the hotpress and any unnecessary use of electricity should be avoided and alternatives considered. Designing a shredder that does not operate on electricity is a realistic constraint and will increase the profit earned as well as removing some electrical hazards. The Code of Ethics by Engineers Australia states that an engineer must practise engineering to foster the health, safety and wellbeing of the community and the environment, more specifically, incorporate social, cultural, health, safety, environmental and economic considerations into the engineering task. (Engineers Australia 2010) Further ethical criterion can be formulated with regards to the code, such as avoiding any use of unsafe or toxic materials such as asbestos. Any material used in the construction of the chair must be safe in the environment that it will be used in. Any negative economic, social and environmental consequences to stakeholders must be considered and minimized with regards to sustainability. Sustainability of our design is important since it must be designed to last long when considering the projects life cycle, especially when considering the context of the benefactors.
2.2 Analysis of Challenge and Resulting Design Criteria
The aim of this challenge, as specified by the design brief, is to design A ecofriendly, easy to use, carteros friendly chair. A chair that can be dismantled any time and folded into smaller pieces and kept away using minimal area. A product that is strong enough to handle the weight of a average human being and to help the locals of Argentina with their every day lifestyle. This product can help the cartoneros increases there quality of lifestyle by using the chair for themselves or selling the chair and making a profit economically. An
important quality of any building material is consistency across the
material, as well as consistency across samples. This is necessary since a material is only as strong as its weakest point, and having a sample that ranges widely in strength must be compensated with a higher safety factor and hence wastes material. The ideal plastic composite used for building would consist of moderately sized rectangle pieces of fibre reinforced plastics compressed together with a hot-press, such as the Kingston Hotpress available to the cartoneros working with Waste for Life. Properties such as high strength and modulus are important in a material used for building and structural purposes. These properties are achieved through aligning the fibres at different orientations to produce a dense and uniform slab. If the plastic sheets are too small, or theyre pressed with the plastic caps unequally there will be minimal overlapping of the fibres which would lead to the slab being susceptible to tensile stresses and would result in failure. Using shredded pieces that are way too big will produce a composite that is not uniform resulting in highly inconsistent properties among samples and hence not useful from a structural viewpoint. A slab needs to be exactly in dimensions with equal amounts of thickness throughout all the slabs, as we dont want any slabs to be weak, as this would result in our chair to be unstable or perhaps unable to withstand the optimum weight. The primary plastic composites that are to be used will be made from alternating layers of plastic, paper and plastic caps and then processed in the hot-press. The composites usually have a thickness of up to 1/8 inch and have flexural strengths of up to 70MPA. In general, the higher the fibre content the higher the strength and modulus being more ideal for a structural material. This prompts the requirement that the manually operated shredder will be capable of shredding composites with these properties.
2.3 Summary of Design Criteria
As specified by the design brief: 1. Manually operated 2. Able to handle average weight of people of Argentina 3. Needs to be stable and uniform Criteria evident from analysis of context and challenge: 4. Safe to operate for experienced and inexperienced cartoneros 5. Able to be constructed and maintained with the available equipment and skills 6. Easy to access all components for maintenance and restoration
7. Able to be maintained and replaced with:
Recyclable materials easily obtained in Buenos Aires,
And/or Inexpensive and easily obtainable components from retailers
8. Easy to operate 9. Assists the cartoneros financially and to improve daily lifestyle 10. Abides by the Code of Ethics, specifically:
Any material used must be safe in the environment which it will be
used in,
Any negative economic, social and environmental consequences to
stakeholders must be considered and minimized to promote sustainable development