DesignIDEATE with Rose Tourje

DesignIDEATE

Full Circle

“Sustainability is circular and businesses need to be circular to be truly sustainable”
– Paul Hawken

It might have been an ordinary day in downtown LA, an Interior Designer with a large A&E firm tasked with modernizing a number of college campus facilities, heard the sounds of ground shaking demolition. An unusual (or was it?) scene was occurring nearby. It continued for three days. Rose Tourje couldn’t shake it from her mind. Big equipment sounds, beeping, scraping, metal and wood crashing and splintering at the sidewalk, carelessly, one minute a collectible piece of 1960’s furniture, the next a destroyed, knurled mound scooped up and loaded in dumpsters the size of living rooms. The sheer enormity of the mass waste she witnessed was disturbing. Then, hauled away, dumpster after dumpster, after dumpster. Why couldn’t those products be reused? What was unacceptable about those products? Who might restore them?

In 2005, there was yet no viable systemic alternative related to used furniture – until ANEW, the Asset Network for Education Worldwide Inc. began as a Los Angeles non-profit. Now, with nearly 20 years of pioneering under the belt, its purpose is aligned not only with the technological revolution of every industry, but the growing concerns and science surrounding climate change. Now, every project that has considered their existing inventory of components of furniture and systems furniture has a future. From enterprise users to individual projects, ANEW works with the design community to record and audit the metrics from the surplus streams of each and every project; emissions tracking is verified as Scope 4 avoidance. ANEW has averted the waste stream of furniture, a 9-12 million ton per year contribution to long term landfill.

Meet Rose Tourje, on a mission beyond leading LA firms and Warner Bros, who formed ANEW. Living proof that design is a verb, and create is what we do, often without limit. ANEW is the leading non-profit organization in North America working with global companies at enterprise scale, with the disciplines of Design, CRE, Program Management, General Contractors, Facility Project Managers, Sustainability Directors and the greater Community to promote social and environmental sustainability through circular design.

As documented in ANEW’s multiple project case studies, when basic processes change, it affects the entire profession. It becomes a new way of design, new design thought, intention, and beginning with the end in mind becomes the way forward. Rose Tourje has moved the needle true north.

We invite you test your entrepreneurial barometer imagining what you could do, on this episode of DesignIDEATE

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