The Urban Water Tree as an example of how the City of Ghent could incorporate recycled plastics in their path towards climate neutrality

The City of Ghent embraces circularity with projects such as the Circuit Circulair contest, Gent Flipt, Circular Kickstart, Capture etc.

In order to facilitate an easy transition towards a more circular society you can't ignore plastics. And that's exactly the core challenge in the INTERREG PlastiCity project: we are investigating how we can boost the recycling rate of plastics significantly.

Co-creation to define a design challenge

To boost the demand for recycled plastics, we wanted to showcase that you can create beautiful, sustainable, useful and marketable products with recycled plastics. We had the opportunity to show some products at the Design Fest Ghent in April 2022, where we also organized a workshop with mainly design students and professionals.

PlastiCity design workshop at Design Fest Ghent in April 2022

We chose to start from a number of challenges we face as a City. The themes of ‘Mobility’, ‘Water,’ Garbage and ‘Green’ in the City were explored and deepened in this workshop. Later on these ideas were also explored with a number of experts/city colleagues. Together with these experts a design challenge was distilled from the obtained insights: “How can we make Ghent resistant to heavy rain, drought and heat with local productsmade with recycled plastics from post-consumer waste?”

Recycling is not a black or white story. It’s a difficult story with many challenges and opportunities.

Gianni Vyncke

University of Ghent

Designing with recycled plastics We commissioned the design agency Apollo 18, that also supervised the co-creation process, to work on this design challenge. We asked them to develop a product that not only captures rain but also to take into account other societal challenges like: integration in the open space, need for shadow/sheltering, social functions like social cohesion, resting, …