Waste is inevitable. So inevitable, it could be considered an inexhaustible resource. This is the case for the informal waste collecting community of Cairo, the Zabbaleen, where the entire treatment and recycling process is contained within their small village and aided by their uncommon willingness to collect the whole city's waste while living amongst pigs.
Similarly, the ageing population of Hong Kong are forced into informal waste collection for income. Using pigs as consumers and a mode of waste transport, the elderly are able to reduce and recycle refuse in the Central party district of Lan Kwai Fong. The elderly occupy ample space to socialise in their waste management tower and feed back their reused food and material products to the local binging ex-pat consumers, in their multi-storey restaurant, Yiu Fa Pig.
Switzerland: civilians are required to sort their own waste, where it is taken to a local collection point and then transported to baling facilities and then material recovery facilities, where they can be recycled and remade, mounting high costs and high energy consumption.
Cairo: Waste could be disposed of anywhere however since the 1930's the Zabbaleen or garbage people have been collecting 3000 tonnes of Cairene waste daily. It is deposited, sorted, recycled, reproduced and resold from their settlement.
With one restaurant per 600 people, Hong Kong boasts one of the highest per capita concentrations of cafes and restaurants in the world. In the approximate 3 square kilometres of Lan Kwai Fong, (located in central) more than 150 clubs, bars and restaurants cater to its ex-pat population of bankers and business men in the nearby central business district. This central location promises ample food and material waste for the proposal. Meanwhile, Hong Kong pensioners are given very little and are forced into informal waste collection in order to maintain enough income to live on.
Due to the density of Lan Kwai Fong, it becomes necessary but also logical to consider the waste management process as a vertical system using gravity to make the spaces work as oppose to its more commonly applied horizontal layout.
Considering how it might be possible to add a social and cultural quality to what is by definition a streamlined process by speculating how the elderly would have opportunities to gather and cluster within different parts of the recycling process.
Particular material processes are combined three- dimensionally as materials get filtered into products that can be used at the bottom of the building.
Pigs are used as a mode of transport to help the elderly shift materials to where they need to be and allow them the freedom to occupy open spaces throughout the building.
When pigs have served their purpose, they are slaughtered and served as a speciality accompaniment to food that is salvaged from nearby restaurants and served in the restaurant of this building, Yiu Fa Pig.
Finally, the proposal provides a space where waste collection is allowed to be the ritual that legitimises (rather than marginalises) the presence of the elderly, reduces waste and continues to gratify the Lan Kwai Fong consumer.
