This project was Rei’s graduation project.
She researched convenience stores as urban infrastructure and the actual state of food waste there through her part-time work at a convenience store, and designed a proposal based on the research.
The impetus for this project came from seeing expired sandwiches being sold in a supermarket. in Italy She began working part-time at a convenience store as part of her fieldwork. Convenience stores are dispersed throughout the city and are part of the infrastructure of modern Japanese society. Through about 10 months of part-time work and fieldwork in various locations, she explored the actual situation of food waste and the social structure behind it, in which all stakeholders are intricately intertwined. While considering the dilemma between what people must do as a job and their personal opinions, she thought about what we should do as people living in the modern system. In the end, she proposed a new role for convenience stores using compost as an intervention that herself could make.
Through her research, she was greatly influenced by the practices of a certain island, which led her to the idea of creating compost that would be returned to the soil. Store employees compost food waste from the store and use the soil to grow vegetables. Instead of selling the vegetables in the market, the vegetables produced by the convenience store composting can be sold directly in the store. Local consumers buy them. Consumers could also be involved in composting. Necessary materials can be obtained at stores and in the community. She thought she could propose a small circulation and society centered on convenience stores. As a convenience store employee, this proposal is also the result of her thinking about how to take responsibility for the waste that convenience store generates. As a way of taking responsibility for the waste they have generated, store employees create compost in the store. Since the materials used for composting are local resources, there is a possibility that the project will spread to the local community as well.
She thought that such a project should be shared with the world, so she held a solo exhibition. The exhibition included a wall display summarizing the fieldwork, pictures and compost, a documentary film, and the sale of booklets.
Afterwards, she and Taiga created a proposal that summarized the project as an architectural design proposal and submitted it to a competition.
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