CEMUS – studio Alternatives collaborative projects

Scrap Library CEMUS and Uppsala University
The Waste Map project highlights flows of waste in Uppsala, regionally and globally. By mapping waste sources, destinations, and patterns, and resource use, it provides invaluable insights into how reuse and upcycle materials, and build more sustainable waste management systems. This project empowers individuals and organizations to make informed decisions, reduce waste, and take collective action toward a more circular future.

 

Scrap Library Bus / Bike / Bag
The Scrap Library Bus, Bike, and Bag initiative takes sustainability on the road. Designed for schools, universities, and educators, this project focuses on how scrap materials can be upcycled into new, useful and fun items, serving as an inspiration to communities, and fostering creativity and environmental consciousness wherever it goes. By bringing resources directly to learners, it empowers them to create and collaborate with a focus on reuse, inspiring a hands-on approach to sustainability.

Uppsala UnContain Collaboratory
The Uppsala UnContain Collaboratory builds on experiences from similar meeting places around Uppsala and the world. It intends to be a creative space for meetings, learning, research and different community-based initiatives, as well as a cultural hub, makers space and workshop for more hands-on activities. Housed in upcycled containers designed by professionals, students and community actors, it hopes to create a space that transcends conventional spaces and formats. These flexible, eco-conscious spaces promote interdisciplinary collaboration, offering room for meaningful innovation and important dialogues on pressing global challenges.

 

Waste Map Uppsala and Beyond
The Waste Map project highlights flows of waste in Uppsala, regionally and globally. By mapping waste sources, destinations, and patterns, and resource use, it provides invaluable insights into how reuse and upcycle materials, and build more sustainable waste management systems. This project empowers individuals and organizations to make informed decisions, reduce waste, and take collective action toward a more circular future.

About studio Alternatives
studio Alternatives is a multifaceted firm working in the areas of creative reuse and design. We have our own workshop with highly skilled and trained craftsmen. In addition to design consultancy, we also execute all scales of projects, products, furniture, accessories, artifacts, installations and customised space-making elements. We believe that along with an interesting and unique concept, it is equally important to have the ability to deliver excellent detailing and very fine quality work.

We love upcycling. Utilising various types of discarded materials to create desirable objects has been our passion. We have been working on upcycling of discarded materials since 2010 and have worked with a varied range of discarded materials such as packaging, thermocol, foil wrappers, glass bottles, tires, plastics, fabric, wood and metal, to name a few. To put it in a nutshell, our work with reclaimed materials, ranges right from coasters to large shipping containers.

Till date, we have executed a vast array of projects such as upcycled shipping container spaces, complete interior design with the theme of upcycling and designing of corporate gifts from discarded materials. Some of the most meaningful projects were those where we could design and make useful furniture/artefacts from the clients’ own discarded materials.

Read more: https://www.studioalternatives.com/

About CEMUS, Uppsala University
The Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), is a student-initiated, interdisciplinary centre at Uppsala University, with the explicit ambition to contribute to a more just and sustainable world. Student-faculty collaboration weaves as a golden thread through the history and organization of all activities at the centre.

Since its inception in the early 1990’s, the centre has initiated and expanded the space for transdisciplinary student-led higher education as well as research and collaboration that transcends traditional academic disciplines and boundaries between academia and society at large.

Read more: https://www.cemus.uu.se/about/

Sonali Phadke Partner and Creative connections studio Alternatives
Sonali comes with an engineering background and her family business in composites and plastics triggered her initial interest in reusing waste. Also, an alumni of The Ecological Society Pune has been a resource person for many environment/socio-economic projects and surveys. She has been an active member of Oikos for Ecological Services and was a part of the Maharashtra Environment Department-funded project on Eco-Education. She is also a team member of the Grassland Trust that works in grassland conservation from both the aspects of human and wildlife concerns. With her background, Sonali brings in the aspect of sustainability from the ecological perspective in the studio’s work.

 

Stephanie Foote Professor of English, University of Vermont and Visiting Professor, SINAS, The Swedish Institute for North American Studies, Uppsala University
Stephanie Foote is Professor of English. She researches and teaches American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present with a particular focus on environmental issues. She is the author of two single-author books The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Class, and Culture in The Age of Realism (2014) and Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001). In 2006, she edited and contributed original afterwords for We Walk Alone and We, Too, Must Love, Ann Aldrich’s 1955 and 1958 sociological accounts of lesbian life in the US. She co-edited (with Elizabeth Mazzolini) Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice (2012), and in 2022 she and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen edited The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. With Stephanie LeMenager, she co-founded Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, which is available on ProjectMuse and JSTOR; she co-edited that journal for over a decade. With Dana Luciano and Anthony Lioi, she is the co-founder and co-editor of the open-access journal Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture. She is currently working on a book about garbage and waste. She has published more than 20 articles and book chapters in journals such as PMLA, Signs, American Literary History, and American Literature, and her work has been funded by the Carnegie Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.

Daniel Mossberg Lead Outreach and Educational Coordinator CEMUS, Uppsala University
Daniel works as lead outreach coordinator and educational coordinator at CEMUS with a wide range of first-hand experience of student-led education, developing new, interdisciplinary courses and programs, open events in collaboration with different partners, creative projects with focus on local sustainability, critical conversations on current and existential issues, open online courses on climate change leadership and much more. He has worked as course coordinator, director of studies, deputy director, with an academic background in cultural anthropology, philosophy, American studies, environment and development studies and climate and sustainability studies. Engaged as student, staff and union representative over the years, and now safety representative at CEMUS.

daniel.mossberg@cemus.uu.se
073-065 02 28

 

Hilda Johansson Bachelor student, Peace and Development Studies, and CEMUS student, Uppsala University
Hilda is a bachelors student in her third year of the program in Peace and Development Studies at Uppsala University. A year ago she decided to specialize my degree towards Sustainable Development and started to take courses at CEMUS, which has allowed her to understand and form my own opinions on environmental action. She has been engaged in humanitarian work since 2021 when she joined UN Women’s organization in Gothenburg. Moving to Uppsala she and a friends decided to start up a local UN Women Network to join the feminist movement against gender-based discrimination and violence from a grassroots level. Hilda’s relationship with nature has always been close and since an early age she has competed in orienteering which has allowed her to explore and enjoy extraordinary nature all over the world. From Sonali Phadke’s presentation during the Project course at CEMUS she were inspired by the project’s intersection of social and ecological justice. The multiple areas of sustainability expertise working together towards a circular economy really spoke to Hilda by showing the ideas from my CEMUS courses put into practice.