Sustainability Research and Strategy

The journey to Sustainability Thinking started with questioning the sustainability competency of a product and visualising a participatory approach that involves various expertise to develop a global understanding of innovation.

This booklet is a comprehensive report of the design project “How Sustainable Is Bhar”.

The motivation behind the design project is the evaluation of an arguable sustainable deal between “no plastic” and “zero waste”, made by the Indian minister Piyush Goyal in 2019. He has attempted to avoid large masses of plastic waste and chosen to replace tea cups made of synthetic materials with traditional terracotta. Disposable terracotta cups have been used for generations and are called Bhar.

The research question “how sustainable is Bhar?'' explores the ability of the terracotta cup to be a valuable alternative to plastic cups in India. The documentation of the design project visualises the multifaceted world of the traditional cup and includes sustainability challenges, results of the ethnographic research in Kolkata in 2019, and the start of a discussion about the measurements of sustainability.