I have been developing a special interest in looking into the WWII and post-WWII years alongside a general investigation into green issues. I believe there’s a lot to learn from that period of history, which was more or less when our present economical order was established. (I have previously written about Utility Furniture, a British government scheme carried out during and recently after the Second World War.) Two books I have recently read—The Waste Makers by Vance Packard (1959), and The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)—made me rethink what we today have no problem to settle with.

Read more »

Futerra is a communications agency in London and New York — they specialise in corporate social responsibility. It’s rewarding to follow their thinking and ideas on communications and sustainability. If you are trying to learn the language of sustainable product design and how to communicate it, they’re on your wavelength.

Futerra has recently compiled it thinking on Greenwash…

They neatly summarise the concept of greenwash and why it’s corrosive to sustainable product design. Importantly, they also give you pointers to avoid looking like greenwash when your message really has merit.
(and see Pli’s tagged blog posts here)

Futerra’s blog often makes a good read, too.
Read more »

Les Mandelbaum, co-founder and president of Umbra, is to our way of thinking. Here are his comments on his company’s sustainable product strategy from the floor of this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Show in New York. The interesting point he makes is that, once you have started down the road to sustainable design and product development, it eventually pervades the whole company and becomes an essential aspect of business and customer relations. The video chops off just when he gets into his stride.

This link came to us via Environmental Leader, a wide-ranging blog site about sustainable strategy for corporations. Worth a look.
Read more »

I heard about Yves Baher about 3 years ago. For me, the jury was out until I saw how he was involved in the OLPC (one laptop per child) project.

In this TED talk he talks about designing value into a product. The style of design was a reaction to his first job designing “skins” for computers. He has now set out to really capture the users needs when designing a product. He takes you through an interesting array of case studies showing how design shouldn’t just be an addition to the project, more a set of values that runs in parallel to the product development.

Read more »

Recently, here at Pli, we setup an LCA (life cycle analysis) system to measure the total impact our products have on the environment. Analysing the data, we realised that a large proportion of the energy used in the life of a product was caused by shipping. Looking at the success of companies like IKEA, the originators of flat-pack, we see that reducing the amount of air you ship can save you money as a company.

In this oil-hungry world, money tends to go hand in hand with energy usage–so reducing shipping sizes equals less money and less energy, which is definitely a win/win for us. However the “ship less air, make more money” formula doesn’t work for everybody. Most people have had the experience of getting a ridiculously over-sized box for a tiny order. Just this week we had about three orders into the workshop in boxes three or four times their size.

There are a many reasons for over-packing a product, whether it is financial or just laziness, but after seeing some of these examples via Treehugger, you may agree that something needs to be done to curb this energy black hole.

If you look closely you can see the small bottle at the front of the picture. Yes it is a medical bottle but come on…
Read more »

Searching online for information on eco-friendly patents, I got sidetracked by blog posts from a design team at Nokia which is publishing research into sustainable mobile communications technology. This is interesting for us at Pli although we make chairs not phones. The links started with a press release about the Homegrown project.

Following up, I started by reading the comments and presentation materials posted by the Near Future Laboratory which led me to Raphael Grignani’s work on Homegrown and also on Remade, another Nokia project.

Read more »

If a corporation has developed and patented a technology that has a general, environmentally-friendly benefit, then how can that patent protection be compatible with the pressing need to share and implement that kind of technology? What’s the point of inventing something environmentally useful if nobody else can use it, or can afford a license to use it?

The Eco-Patent Commons initiative sets out to address the issue in such a way as to reassure large, tech-driven corporations whose intellectual property is an important part of their market value. The scheme is being led by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM in partnership with Nokia, Sony and Pitney Bowes.

As an example of how the scheme can work, have a look at
Nokia’s initiative which they annouced in January 2008.

For the full low-down on Eco-Patent Commons, click on the image…

Read more »

The rise of green awareness puts designers and manufacturers in a position where they have to back up what they say. A helping hand comes from FIRA (furniture industry research association), who launched an online software tool named Furniture FootPrinter, with an RSA event on April 17th. Pli was there to get a grasp of this brand new green tool for the industry.

Read more »

I truly adore reading leftover material, and my latest experience was even more pleasurable for being about green issues. Taking a look at an abandoned April 12th issue of The Times, I learned about Bill Bryson’s launch of a three year campaign against street littering. Take a look at this article to see how serious his commitment to “Keep Britain Tidy” is.

“London is now the dirtiest city in Europe as well as the costliest.” Now, that is some paradox.

Read more »

When researching eco-friendly consumer markets, it’s tough trying to find a balance between the opinions and ideas of enthusiasts, sceptics and the rest of us. The BBC News site has started to aggregate its consumer and industry environmental news into a section called the Green Room.

Read more »

Have you ever wondered about the ’stuff’ you buy? Where it comes from, or even why you even bought it in the first place? If you have then Annie Leonard has some answers for you. Her video ‘The Story of Stuff’ is a clear and concise breakdown of how we are consuming the planet in the name of ’stuff’. Click image for the link.

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.