Totaling several billions of tons a year worldwide, agricultural waste––produced by raising plants and animals, and including stalks, husks, hulls, and manure––is both a problem and an opportunity. In this interview with Design Emergency co-founder Paola Antonelli, Ghanaian-Filipino architectural scientist, designer, and entrepreneur Mae-ling Lokko discusses the many effective and elegant ways she has devised to transform agrowaste into building materials that continue the cycle of life as opposed to interrupting it––and redistribute value along the way. Agriculture harks back to roughly 12-15,000 years ago, when our ancestors abandoned their peripatetic hunting-and-foraging life and settled down, beginning to mold the world to their needs and wants. The more sophisticated tools required to cultivate the land and the spatial planning required to establish those settlements point to design’s centrality in establishing this new era, and therefore also in unleashing the rampant colonization and exploitation of the planet which we now call the Anthropocene. Be as it may, design can now also play a central role in mitigating its negative effects, Mae-ling Lokko suggests in this episode. As the founder of Willow Technologies in Accra, Ghana, a company which upcycles agricultural waste into affordable bio-based building materials and water quality-treatment applications, she is actively demonstrating the viability of a new, wholesome model of design and entrepreneurship.You’ll find images of the projects Mae-ling describes in this interview on our Instagram feed @design.emergency. Thank you for listening! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.