Sustainability from Childhood, is InCreative Co's new series aimed at exploring the relationship between our connection to nature as children, and our dedication to our natural world, environmental strategists, mechanical engineers, herbalists and foragers speak their truth to power and together create a collection of imaginative and practical proposals for the action that we need in this moment of climate catastrophe.

Hear from InCreativeCo member Evan Landau.

Video Transcript

Evan Landau: How can you turn that into something that's productive? Instead of damaging? Why? Why can't we just take everyone's garbage and turn it to something else? Why can't we have the things that people consume? What can we have those be beneficial to the environment as well.

Gilian Rappaport: Welcome to the sustainability from childhood audio series initiated by Gillian Rapoport and commissioned by In Creative Company. Sustainability from childhood explores the relationship between our connection to nature as children, and our dedication to our natural world, environmental strategists, mechanical engineers, herbalists and foragers speak their truth to power and together create a collection of imaginative and practical proposals for the action that we need in this moment of climate catastrophe. Join us as we explore what messages about climate possibility? Do we need to share with our communities now?

Gilian Rappaport:  Did you spend time in nature as a kid? How does that experience relate to the work you do now? If at all?

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Childhood Experiences Vs The Now👪

Evan Landau: Yeah, I think it does and I mean, I definitely didn't, you know, I didn't like camping every weekend when I was a kid or anything. But I, I grew up kind of, on the periphery of New York City, and in a fairly small beach town that in a short walk, I could be down at the water, and all my relatives live around town, and they all have houses that the past couple years, they get flooded more and more every year and, you know, I can see really clearly like, you know, I remember where the water used to be when I was a kid, and now it's not there anymore and that, that kind of like just that little, I mean, it's not a little but that one frame of reference, I think, is really powerful because if you just live like, in the plains, like if you live in the middle of the country, and you don't have a shoreline around you, that's just something that you like, here, and you're like, whatever and, you know, you see those maps of like, okay, if the ice caps melt, like this is where the shoreline is going to be and I don't know, it's all all that stuff, I think it either lands with people or doesn't and that's, that's been something that's been really interesting to me and it's the same as the garbage thing.

It's like the out of sight, out of mind thing, like, if you don't see what is happening right from your face, you can, you can tell people, all the stats and all the facts that you have. But it's, you know, these things don't, the plane doesn't land unless you have some kind of like, real life experience behind it. So yeah, I think my, you know, my parents always, like, took me to different places around, you know, where we lived, and we went hiking and camping, I had, I think, a very positive relationship with nature and then in college, I went to school, like up in the middle of New Hampshire, and it was just the access to, you know, different trails and mountains and rivers and then it was through so close, that it's, I think just, I had an interest that was piqued and I took advantage of that. But I think that that's just my personal preference, I have a lot of friends that just, you know, it's, they don't really they would rather be in the middle of Times Square and like, in the woods. So that's always been something that has been a question in my mind, like, how do you get those people to care?

Because it's not just about nature, right? It's about the planet, it's about our quality of life. So how do you how do you get people that don't, you know, tend to time to reflect and like, go on a walk in and look at like the birds and trees and things around and have that have, you know, some kind of emotional impact and how do you how do you get the people to care that really don't like that doesn't that doesn't do it for those people have always kind of like disturbed me that because I don't get how, how that couldn't have an impact on your your heart and mind. But that's part of being a designer, I think is to learn how to, you know, cater to and learn how to design for people that you just genuinely don't understand. That's a big part of it.

Gilian Rappaport: Where are you in the world and what do you do involving sustainability?

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Sustainability🍃

Evan Landau: I'm an industrial designer. I live in Queens, New York, have kind of lived all over New York for the past couple years here in Astoria for about two now. I work in a couple of different disciplines of design, research and strategy. But the thing that I like to do most is related to sustainable design as relates to turtles and manufacturing, in the scope of industrial design. Currently, I'm working for an agency doing design research and then through my private practice working on a variety of industrial design sustainability, ethnographic research and brand strategy projects.

Gilian Rappaport: What led you to get into this work?

Evan Landau: Yeah, I think first and foremost, it's really the the existential dread I get from work and what it means to work today and noticing that growing up, graduating from college, getting into the workforce living in New York City, most people I encountered really didn't like their jobs. And I thought that was a really peculiar thing and so I was working at a research agency called normal andI was just a little bit disillusioned by how, you know, led by the nose of advertising, everything is overly commercialized, and it doesn't, you know, the things that people do everyday don't really relate to life, that to me was troubling and so I applied to grad schools, I got into Parsons, who will design their industrial design master's program, and in between, took a little sabbatical a few months off to do some independent research projects and I did a couple month long project on behalf of a couple social service agencies in Manhattan, working with their homeless communities, and interviewing individuals experiencing homelessness, about their experience with social service programs and that was, that was kind of the first, I guess, you could say, purpose driven project that I did and it led me in an interesting way into the field of sustainability because I realized that it just felt a lot better to be doing that to be putting my brain to use and my time to use something that could serve somebody in some way.

Something that is, you know, it's it's real, that so that that was that was kind of my primer for going into Parsons, and that led me down exploring different pathways of purpose driven design, and what that can be, for various reasons, that that transformed into being more broadly related to sustainability, particularly what things were made out of, and how they're made and there's a couple different reasons for that I've always considered myself an outdoors person, I feel very in touch with nature I, being in the city, is, is kind of bewildering to me, sometimes I just came back from Utah on the West Coast and I got back like seven o'clock this morning and I feel very refreshed, even though I'm exhausted just because I've been in that kind of environment for the past two weeks and that to me, is rejuvenating, refreshing, it's a I am not sure if people are meant to exist like this all the time with, you know, streets and cars and giant buildings and stuff.

Anyway, that's all that I ended up focusing on. My thesis was kind of more exploratory design and research and the whole core of my exploration was questioning why we have to make everything we make out of something new, and why we can't start treating our waste as a society as a natural resource and a starting point, to make you objects out instead of just kind of the end of the road and really how absurd it is how we like to treat the things that we consume, and how we throw things away. It's It's, people have a really, I don't know what it is, I don't know where, you know, in our evolution, you pick this up. But when things are out of sight, they're truly out of mind and through interviews and research and just kind of general exploration, I found that people have this sense of relief when they throw something out because it's not their problem anymore because we're thinking about things in that way. It's kind of becoming all of our problem at you know, in a really big way.

So I was really interested in looking at different ways streams and seeing what their potential could be for creating something new. I spent a year working on a thesis project that related to paper waste, and how that can be used as a substitute for plastics in certain situations and then since I've worked on a variety for my private practice on a variety of projects that were focused on sustainability, and the one thing I'm working on now that I'm really excited about, and working with a carbon capture startup that will suddenly start its collective no one really gets paid to do it like everyone is everyone's there because they care and that to me is a really exciting type of environment to be working in and collaborating with those types of people because there's engineers, chemists, there's policymakers, there's designers like me, and people were taking time out of their week to do it because they know it's important.

A lot of what the group does is focused on carbon capture technology and how to pull carbon out of the air. And I'm focusing more on the utilization of that. So once you have carbon dioxide or a physical form of carbon, what can we do with it? How can we utilize it in a way where it's not going to get immediately released back into the atmosphere and it's interesting to use, it's kind of the opposite of the circular economy, which I've been doing a lot of work and over the past couple years, where we want things to keep on living, we want things to exist in perpetuity and this is kind of the polar opposite of that, where we want to pull stuff out of the air, and we want to keep it into something like we want to put it into something that it's going to be like that for as long as possible.

“But when things are out of sight, they're truly out of mind and through interviews and research and just kind of general exploration, I found that people have this sense of relief when they throw something out because it's not their problem anymore because we're thinking about things in that way.” - Evan Landau

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Gilian Rappaport: Who are your collaborators in this process?

Evan Landau: So the collective that I'm working with is called Open Air, they have, I think, probably a couple 100 members at this point and they're a really great group, they focus on open source methods of developing carbon capture technology and then they have a lot of people on the advocacy and policy side, that they're actually, you know, lobbying for better rural laws about, you know, carbon capture and utilization and they just worked, they were just working with New York State about a new law, and I can't speak to it well, but it relates to concrete that has that that's carbon negative, or at least carbon neutral, as you might know, concrete, it contributes to 8% of all greenhouse gasses in the world.

Building Materials, it's one of the most wasteful and, and energy consuming industries in the world, you know, that's, that's, that's stuff that really moves the needle forward because I could sit here and design things all day. But if I'm not working with anyone that is more focused on putting ideas and concepts into law, I truly think that that's the way that sustainable design can really have a great long lasting impact. When I was working on the paper recycling project for my thesis, I was talking to a lot of policymakers and people that worked at recycling facilities because I mean, it's a rabbit hole, you could go down for your entire career, what are all the laws about how we recycle things, because a lot of it is kind of, like illogical, a lot of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But it's just, it's these things that are antiquated that they stick around, and it takes someone that works in a lobby or at least is going to, you know, is passionate about the subject and it's going to take that into account. That duality. That's, that's how I think that's how stuff is gonna get done and a lot of people working in carbon capture are pretty into that. So I think that's great. I've been working with them. And then I mean, most of my freelance projects that I'm doing for a living to make money with a lot of that work are with startups and whenever I can, I'm trying to work with startups that have some sustainability, led principles that they're working with, for the products that they're creating. 

Gilian Rappaport: So you're working with them, when they're generally like they're making some kind of physical product and they're interested in consulting with you to figure out better ways of producing with better materials.

Evan Landau: Sometimes it's hard to make it to generalize, because I'm working with sometimes people who come to me, and they have a pretty fleshed out concept and they need you to do that. They need you to help them figure out how they're going to manufacture it, where kind of materials, whenever I can. I'm trying to implement a phase of ethnographic user research and lifecycle analysis into that type of work. That's something that I find that, especially startups they want to gloss over, because it's not, doesn't seem like there's a direct return on that investment. But it's really important, it's important to research, it's important to know the impact of the materials that you're working with.

But sometimes startups or individuals or whoever come to me, and they just have an idea and my job is to really go from like, you know, sticky note sketch to something that's, that's real and then I've been approached with products that are already exists or already in the market to do more research and, you know, opportunity analysis for you know, I think there's a lot of up up there and I'm glad I get those types of projects, because we make a lot of crap as a society like there's so much stuff I'd almost rather help optimize the current product and make a new product because we just, there's there's just too many things. I think it's a lot of better use of my time and skills to figure out how to make something have less of an impact and in general like, like, make new tools for new stuff and that's why I think in my career, in my trajectory over the past couple years, I've been moving away from working in CAD and designing physical things more towards a higher level design strategy area of work. We're thinking about how not to make one thing specific, but the way that we can make lots of things and that's the whole point of this carbon capture project I'm working on, it's, you know, I'm not thinking about making it like a speaker or bowl or whatever, like, how can we?

How can we create materials that can be used? For everything? How can we put carbon from the air and like, everything we touched on us that that that, to me working in that scope, I'm hoping it has more of an impact and people need something tangible, like they need a physical representation of what that could look like. So there's value in doing that exercise. But my goal is to think kind of at a more mass manufacturing scale of how these things can have an impact and a lot of people working in carbon capture utilization are focusing on making things they're working on concrete, which is great fuels and gasoline. Makes sense. But my thought is that if we put into all the tiny things that we use all the time sort of buildings, that that has an impact, because we just all by us so much stuff and from what I know about people, I don't think that there's anything that we're going to do about that. So we might as well make things have a little bit less of an impact. Well, and suddenly, these things are kind of bad physical examples, because they're, like, lumpy and weird looking. But the whole, the whole user research part of the paper project was, you know, how can something be made where you can't even tell?

And it doesn't even like, there's this whole theme in sustainable products and sustainable design for a while where anything sustainable, you can like, see, grain in it, it was wrapped in a brown paper bag, and like it had like there was there was a look to it and that's alienating for some people, because some people are like, some people just want stuff to be as processed as possible, because it'll work better or it's more sanitary, or whatever. As soon as you start being like, Yeah, this is made of garbage people are like, do like, it's, that's kind of gross. So how can we basically hide that, but at the same time you use the materiality of things, to their own advantage and in my work as an ethnographic researcher, I came across the exact realization that you just said, we're not going to change people's behaviors. So how do we work around those things? And how do we do things that are considerate to their behaviors and to people's opinions? We're all pretty stubborn creatures, and you're not going to do things out of the goodness of their hearts. In my opinion. It's more about how do we make stuff like this more normal? So people don't even think about it?

Gilian Rappaport: What do you see as the messages that most motivate people to take action toward using or creating with more sustainable materials?

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Messages that Motivate📩

Evan Landau: No, on that note, we've seen that guilt and fear don't really work and that that was kind of the sustainability community, I think, people were trying to hang on those platforms for a bit, because, you know, it's any field or any industry becomes a bubble. I talked about this stuff all day, I read about this stuff all day  I try to interact with people that also care about it, you know, one has to realize that the vast majority of the population, they don't, they don't have those conversations, and I don't, you know, make an effort to read about that. But in order for somebody to really have like a diametric change you need, you need the support of everybody. People have been getting global warming, shoved in their face and it's become obvious that a lot of people just don't really give a damn and that to me is really confusing and kind of bewildering.

These types of initiatives, it has to be more about normalizing things, and kind of like sneakily inserting things into people's routines and habits that will help instead of hurt because right now, all of our habits hurt. Like they are our everyone's daily rituals, shawl, covering trash, like we all just make trash all day and like, how can we have that like, how can you turn that into something that's productive? Instead of damaging? Why can't we just take everyone's garbage and turn it to something else? And why can't we have the things that people consume? What can we have that is beneficial to the environment as well? There's obviously a lot of that, those are much more complicated questions. I think, doing that instead of trying to convince people to care, I think I mean, that's been my approach with this type of work because I'm just not convinced that enough people will care in time to actually do something about it.

Gilian Rappaport: Will you say more about what you meant by sneakily before?

Evan Landau: Well, I think that the most, when I find a new object, I like to inspect it, I take it apart and put it back together, I try to figure out what it's made out of and I realized that most people don't do that. Most people don't care if something is made out of something like Virgin Polypropylene. They don't know they don't care. It doesn't occur to them and so what I mean by sneakily is, like, instead of making everything out of Virgin Polypropylene, why don't we just make it out of like, use paper? Or why don't we embed, you know, like, 10% carbon from the air in all these objects and we don't have to tell people, you know, we can tell people if we want to, and if they care, they can listen, but maybe I'm a pessimist, but it might, my understanding is that most people aren't going to pay the extra dollar and so I think that, you know, in order to work with alternative materials, I'm always really concerned with two things. Is this going to take more energy than it's worth?

And that's the big question, carbon capture. Today, a lot of these technologies produce more emissions than they're pulling out of the air and you have to start there because if you don't start there, you're never going to get to a place where it's, you know, more practical. That's, that's, that's all all the naysayers. Same thing with electric cars, people are like, “Oh, but it creates more emissions.” Like, it's, you know, if you look at the entire ecosystem of electric cars, burning greenhouse, here, you're burning fossil fuels to make electricity, you know. So that's one thing, we have to make sure that these are net positive life cycles and if they're not, we have to make sure that, you know, you can scientifically and practically turn it into one and the other thing is, is the financial case, when I was doing my investigation into recycling facilities and talking to manufacturers about, you know, how they spent materials to make products out of, it's just bottom lines and if recycled, HDPE costs more than HDPE. They're not going to use it.

So, you know, how do we create that goes back to the policy stuff? Like, how do we increase infrastructure? And how do we have the laws and incentives in place? To normalize these things? How do we push the needle in that direction, and it's just a spreadsheet to make stuff out of virgin plastic and so you know, will it take a rebate for manufacturers, that they get money back, if they use recycled materials, that kind of stuff seems pretty obvious to me. So that's why I've been trying to buddy up with people that, you know, know, their way around city halls and stuff like that. That's, that, to me is like a really, that's a good pair. Those are good teammates that can get stuff done.

Gilian Rappaport: How does this relate to the economic opportunity, that is climate change?

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Economic Opportunity and Climate Change❄️

Evan Landau: When I was going to send it to the municipality it was the big one there. They're a sorting facility. In Brooklyn, I went there and I learned something really interesting, which is that these bales of mixed paper are dirty, they're contaminated with plastic and things like that. But they have a negative value. So people have to pay people to take them away and so that's the kind of thing where it's just like, such a dull moment, like if you're, if you're a manufacturer, you can get paid to take people's paper bales, and then you can turn them into something and get paid for the product and, again, it's always more complicated than that. But that, to me is just such a dumb thing and I, through my conversations with people in carbon tech, by I'm convinced that that could be the same scenario in a couple of years with carbon, because there's all these startups, all these companies, that they're really focused on sucking it out of the air, but they haven't really come up with a super concrete use case of what they're gonna do with it.

You know, in five years, if everyone's sitting on millions of tanks of co2, and they don't know what to do with it, they're gonna start paying people to take it away and I think that that's the kind of economics that hopefully we can start normalizing these things and getting them where it's just more established, because that's what it takes, you know, until the 80s. Like, people didn't really make a whole lot of stuff out of plastic and now we do and now it's normal. You because that's normally what happens a lot and, and it's just like the bubble of sustainable design we get you get caught up in what's normal and people don't always want to do like the mental aerobics of thinking about what if future state, you know, how can we make this happen, because if we're just we're creatures of habit, I think that that's the biggest observation I've had talking to people about this stuff is that we just do what we do and if we go get a cup of coffee every morning and throw our cup, that's just what we do until we have reason to change that.

I think COVID kind of it, there was a lot of over momentum with sustainability and I was working on my project, when that happened and I saw this just abrupt screeching halt with a lot of sustainability initiatives, because all of a sudden, people were more concerned about sanitation and sterilization and virgin plastic became like the holy grail of a fiscal object, because we knew it was safe and so seeing all that unfold was really, really interesting and, you know, now, it's like, the tail end of that, where there's just millions and millions of masks and latex gloves and we don't have the facilities, you know, thank God, there's companies like TerraCycle, around that you can package them up and send them to TerraCycle and they'll pelletize the latex and the lungs.

But that's a drop in the bucket and, you know, what, what do we do? What do we do with all of our stuff? Are we going to, you know, are we really just going to, like, press into blocks and build an extension of Manhattan mount to the water? Or are we going to do something that is like, like, are we just going to bury all this stuff, or we're gonna figure out something to do with it that has, you know, has legs that has some kind of positive implications for the future? And shows that we're really qualitatively thinking about how we exist as sorry, as the society with all of our stuff and whenever we can, like, hold ourselves accountable to the fact that we were making all this stuff, we need to figure out what we're going to do with it, or else we're just going to drown in it.

Gilian Rappaport: Well, you tell us more about your process and the materials and your work.

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The Process Behind the Work💼

Evan Landau: Yeah, absolutely, I really subscribe to the Double Diamond methodology of design, something I learned in my undergrad when I was studying mechanical engineering and product design, to me that that really works and the whole idea of it is that you, it's the diamond, the height of the diamond is your scope of what you're doing and so you start with a problem and then you try all these different things out to solve this problem and you start identifying something. So you, you do exploration, figure out something that sticks a little bit, and then you refine that down until you have some kind of jumping off point and then you basically do the same thing, again, you explode out all these different possibilities of that one solution and then you refine that now and again, you've come up with you know, and that's, that's a similar approach to what I do with research, you have to think of every possibility, you have to really like, blow a problem up and then once you have all those pieces, you make sense of them.

Like my desk is always covered in these things, because you have to really see, like, see every every side of a cube, right? And then once you know, whatever size it is, you can start putting it back together, coming up with a way to do something about it. So that's extremely generalized. But that's basically what I do. I really believe in exploration and like making problems messy and then you have to really, like, live with these things in your brain to make sense of them and can't really explain that process that well, because it's just you're, you're just digesting information, and then something clicks and then when something clicks, it's about having, you know, the motivation and facilities to try for that. So right now with the carbon capture, 3d printing filament, I'm kind of in that wide open phase where my office is filled with like, all these different materials and I basically combine them.

I'm no chemist, like, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing with this. I'm just seeing when it comes out, if it's something that's useful, and if I can make an object that is, you know, has I, I've spent a lot of time with different materials and now I'm making new ones. So what is materiality? What are the properties of faces last fall? Is it strong or brittle? And then as a designer, had, you know going through the very hands on exercises like, what? What kind of speed? Is it? Is it a phone case? Is it a box for food or something? Like, what is it? And so that's the whole exercise I'm going through right now. And then as I was talking about before, I'm always trying to think about these things at a higher strategic level, I can make a phone case out of something, what else can I make out of it? How does that scale up from this machine? I am in my office, to an injection molding facility? How does it scale up to global mass manufacturing, because if we're doing something in a vacuum doesn't have that much value, you know, anything I'm working on? It has to have some application to, you know, a very broad area of manufacturing,

Gilian Rappaport: How do you explain what you do to someone outside of your industry? How about even your little cousin?

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Perspective Outside the Industry👓

Evan Landau: I would probably say that I designed physical objects and tried to figure out how to make them better for the planet. Like, I think that's really, I don't want to give the impression. That's what I do all day, every day like that, that's definitely I went down that path, that person's because I realized that in grad school, no one's paying you to do something and so you might as well do something that's really interesting to you and I am happy I laid the groundwork, because it's attracted people with projects like that, to me, and in a perfect world, in a year or two from now, maybe three, like, I'm doing that all day, every day, that's amazing. But right now, you know, an observation that I've had is that there's not that big of an appetite for it and, you know, in comparison, I was working on a project that's related to corporate sustainability goals.

It's all very, like, ethereal and high level and it's still like, comes down to ad campaigns for it, basically, and like, what they're gonna say, on their website, and that seems really sucks and, you know, it's, if you really look at it, like a water bottle that says, you know, it says in big letters, and it's like, ocean plastic or something and then if you look at the fine print for it, it's ocean bound and plastic, which means absolutely nothing. It just means a piece of plastic that could have one day ended up in the ocean and so that kind of like that, that kind of greenwashing I think, is pretty damaging to this industry, because it gives people and sorry, I'm rambling a lot now. But like the whole straw thing, everyone got their metal straw or their plastic straw and, and pulled it up in there and it kind of made people go like that a little bit. It's like, Hey, I did my piece. But that's so far from the truth.

When I'm interacting with other people about this, I like to try to have them make their own conclusions about it. Because I think leading people there's a lot more powerful than, like, prescribing information and like pointing and saying things to people. So that's why I think, you know, participatory design and, like Design Thinking workshops are a really good tool, that's something that I've used in the past that I feel like was really successful and left a lasting impression with people. Because you can, you can get up on your soapbox, and you can talk all day and like people might listen, but they might not really like, understand where you're coming from, I think you'd have to give people the tools to like, figure it out for themselves and figure out how it has eaten for them personally. So I think it's really interesting that you're interested in how people's childhoods will lead them to being involved in this space. Because this is all about people's frame of reference. Like, if you've never been out in nature, and like had that moment of peace and clarity, then you really truly might not care about a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about because it doesn't land home and if you've never liked being on a beach in a remote part of the world and seen like a bunch of coke bottles on like, like that. That's the kind of stuff that I think people need to experience for themselves and not just like, watch a commercial or like, see an infographic in a Wall Street Journal article.

“Because I think leading people there's a lot more powerful than, like, prescribing information and like pointing and saying things to people.” - Evan Landau

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Gilian Rappaport: I'm always amazed how much I think I know before a conversation when I reflect at the end. I think there's a lot we can learn from each other.

Elaine Gazzard: And when you smell something, you can't really be too engaged in the outside world. It's very intimate with ourselves and it's a nice way to help me shut it off for a moment.

Evan Landau: How can you turn that into something that's productive? Instead of damaging? Why can't we just take everyone's garbage and turn it to something else? Why can't we have things that people consume? Can we have those be beneficial to the environment as well.

Latoya Ramos: I'm very fascinated by water and the ocean one because of just the ebbs and flows the waves is tranquility that the tranquility that it provides, but also, it's so powerful.

Mackenzie Beth: Yes, we have the capacity to do great harm to the planet. But we also have the same capacity, if not more capacity to do good to create to add value to make a positive impact on our surroundings and so let's actually learn the skills.

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