'Bin Burger' exhibit within the 'Waste Age' exhibition, Design Museum, 23 October 2021 – 20 February 2022

In June 2021, academics at TU Delft and Queen’s University Belfast were approached by the Design Museum curators to reframe active research on food waste to feature in the ‘Waste Age’ Exhibition. From June until September 2021, a collective of architecture, urbanism and engineering design-researchers worked together to combine different research interests into an accessible exhibit highlighting food waste issues and opportunities.

The resulting output from this collaboration was the design of a fictional circular fast-food restaurant called ‘Bin Burger’ using data from a TU Delft researcher. This data quantified that 200 million burgers are consumed in London annually and from this, visualised the land area required to produce these burgers. This new restaurant concept explored the potential of producing burgers from urban food-waste in a more sustainable, waste-free future.

The ‘Bin Burger’ exhibit is comprised of two components:
(i) The first is a digital interface that allows museum users to enact a fast-food ordering experience at the ‘Bin Burger’ restaurant. Each menu choice: beans, chicken, worms, crickets and fish, is visually compared with beef to communicate the amount of waste required to make each patty –revealing how to make more sustainable food choices in an immersive environment.
(ii) The second component is a pair of posters which provides a background to the research, a map of London’s organic waste and how many burgers can be made with it. These posters also explore how to change food waste into burger patties, and visualises how different urban and architectural spaces might be redesigned to facilitate this new model for food production and consumption.

‘Bin Burger’ featured in the Design Museum’s main exhibition space as part of ‘Waste Age’ from 23.10.21 to 20.02.22. Key images are also featured in the book called ‘Waste Age: what can design do?’ (pg104-105 – see PDF attached). The concept was featured in several online news articles as well as in the UKRI website as an example of research impact (see links attached).