In one of our lectures at Konstfack, we tuned, via Skype, to Mark Drewell from South Africa to hear some of his views on the current hot topics for our planet. The uniqueness of this online “mini-lecture” was not just in the form and the medium that was used, but also in the message. Mark paraphrased James Martin and his book The Meaning of the 21st Century, which actually has a whole school build around and named after it. Martin uses an analogy named “Into The Canyon” to describe the situation of our civilization as we face many signs telling us there’s something wrong with the way we’ve been dealing with the world.
“The Canyon” is a metaphor for the downfall of our species, considering the increasing number of social, ecological, political issues we have to deal with—inequity, population overload, intolerance, carbon overload, etc. The metaphor says that we’re heading down the canyon at full speed, and predicts the bottom-most point will be reached as we start experiencing vital problems–such as water scarcity–on a worldwide level. Read more »
Thanks to the BMD Love Blog for this link to 100%’s new vox-designer video all about sustainable design.
I know about the designers and journalists Max Fraser and Aaron Stone have interviewed for this film but I don’t really know them for their work in overtly sustainable design projects yet - something to look into. Send in your examples of mainstream sustainable design and we’ll feature them in the comments feed here.
Waste Neutral is a novel waste management philosophy developed by staff at the Eden Project. The philosophy encourages people to balance the weight of waste they throw out with the weight of recycled material in new products. Hence, being waste neutral means that no more waste reaches landfill.
Alongside ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ the Eden Project suggests that we should consider ‘reinvest’ to support products that divert recycled materials from landfill and do their bit to close the loop.
Waste Neutral
The Eden Project awards the Waste Neutral Mark to products which have been made with recycled materials and responsible manufacturing processes. These products helps neutralise the amount of waste that reaches landfill. The Reee Chair does this, saving 2.4kg of waste plastic from landfill, and will be launched with the waste neutral logo embossed onto each rib of the chair.
Pli asks: Can you do your bit to be Waste Neutral?
I will be taking part in the “100% Sustainable?” round table discussion to be held at London’s 100% Design exhibition in Earl’s Court on 21 September.
The discussion will open up to take questions from the floor and it’ll be great to hear some testing questions and illuminating ideas, so come along if you’re available. It starts at 2 pm on the 100% Sustainable? stand.
100% Design 2008
There will be a seminar on each day of the exhibition. Sunday will be the best one. The seminars are free to exhibition visitors (that’s free to trade visitors too, if you register online before 12 September).
Here’s 100% Design’s description of the event… Read more »
Pli has been working towards sourcing all of our materials sustainably since we started in 2003. We have met and discussed novel, eco-friendly materials for our furniture designs with suppliers in India, China and all over the UK. We’ve built up a fair amount of knowledge and experience which we are eager to share with other designers.
So Pli was really pleased to be given the opportunity to talk at the Eco Design Network’s Big Picture Brunch in London on 18 September. Christopher Pett from Pli will be discussing our experience and ideas regarding from compostable panel furniture to biocomposites and recycled plastics.
The EDN Big Picture Brunch
There will be lots of interesting speakers there and we are looking forward to learning a lot and getting into some lively and illuminating discussions. Apparently the coffee and croissants are on the house so we hope to see you there! Read more »
Here’s an announcement from our friends at Birmingham City University’s Institute of Art & Design…
Sustainability specialists will be converging at the ICC in Birmingham at 12 noon on Monday 15th September for an interactive debate. The focus of the debate will be looking at issues facing up and coming managers and future leaders in the development of green strategies in the work place. The event, organised by Birmingham City University, follows research into attitudes and influences in developing green policies, reviewing how individuals can pro actively apply green lifestyle choices in the workplace.
Grrreen Debate
The Big Debate chaired by the BBC’s special correspondent Richard Bilton, will feature Peter Ainsworth, Shadow Environment Secretary, leading blogger for treehugger.com, Leonora Oppenheim (expert in eco design) and Birmingham Post and Mail environmental correspondent Patrice John. Read more »
Trying to derive a lesson from the Utility Scheme, one of my main arguements was that no matter how benign the intentions of an authoritarian action are, history shows us that the public never fully abides by what has been put forward as mandatory. It is very interesting to see that this argument can in fact strike a chord in today’s current affairs.
A recent piece of news talks about a decision by the German civic authorities to make solar panels mandatory in the town of Marburg. This legislation sets a rule for “every new house or those whose roofs or heating systems are being renovated to install solar panels”.
Looks like killing two birds with one stone: Battling climate change and surviving at a time when energy prices are soaring. Nothing wrong up to this point? Don’t be so quick to judge.
Eray Cayli spent a couple of months with Pli this summer, working on a life cycle analysis tool for product designers. Some of his blog posts on this site have sparked interest among other designers. He has been invited to speak at the Green and Thrifty event on Wednesday evening this week (18 June).
Eray has travelled from Istanbul to share his research and ideas at this seminar. If you will be in London and you have an interest in sustainable design, I highly recommend his presentation.
Note: you need to register to attend but there are some places left. Click the London Remade logo to register.
Here are the details: Date: 18 June 2008
Time: 4 — 7pm
Venue: Rich Mix Centre 35 - 47 Bethnal Green Road,
London E1 6LA
Eray will be talking about Utility furniture. He’ll be comparing the design and product development trends of the 1940s with our own situation. I guarantee you’ll think differently about your priorities, opportunities and risks as a designer once you have heard what Eray has to say about his studies in mid 20th Century design.
The Green and Thrifty event has been put together by London Remade. There’ll be a panel of speakers talking about thrifty design and thrifty business. There’ll be an exhibition on site, featuring [re]design and others. There will be drinks and things to eat. There will be a rag and bone cart, so bring your electronics waste for recycling. There will be lots of interesting people to meet.
Green and Thrifty is part of the Love London festival, running from 1–21 June. Click on the image to go to the Love London website…
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 »
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
In January 08, Pli exhibited at the Interiors Birmingham Exhibition and fortunately we were able to secure a bit of air time on the show’s TV network. The clip is about strengthening the role of environmental furniture in the British furniture industry. Enjoy.
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.
I’m interested in the Eden Project’s Waste Neutral initiative, which has formed the basis of the giant Cornish greenhouse and education centre’s waste and procurement strategy over the last couple of years. In fact the conferences and discussions we have attended at Eden have inspired us at Pli to think more systematically about how we can help ourselves and our customers, to balance the waste we produce with the waste we might be able to reuse.
It’s a tricky issue: there are so many sources of waste and it all goes off in different directions for disposal. Just about the only point where it could all come together to be quantified and evaluated is in our own home - hardly the ideal place. Sometimes my own kitchen feels like it’s overflowing with all the waste I’m carefully separating as I go, often to cram a lot of it back together in a big blue plastic box for Southwark Council to take away. I could hardly say I’m on top of it all.
So I was fascinated to learn in Time Magazine about RecycleBank - a pleasing example of some entrepreneurial person putting himself in my shoes and working out what he can do to help me out.
Water conservation is a hot topic at the moment, right up there with carbon footprints and organic food. How much am I using? What part of my day uses the most water? Most of us could only roughly guess the answers to these questions. If you would like to get a handle on your consumption - and know more about what water goes where - have a play on this water calculator from Zerofootprint.net (via Treehugger).
It is interesting to see what effects your water consumption the most: just shaving a minute of your showers can save around 3000L of water in a year. However, if you just can’t give up your shower time, try finding the extra savings somewhere else in your water footprint. For example you can install one of these Australian ‘Quench’ showers (also via treehugger) which lets you you recycle your shower water for long, guilt free showers (excuse the semi nudity and accents).
For a while now, we’ve been using some research from WRAP (the UK Government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme) to compare the weight of our furniture with average weights for different UK furniture categories. It’s part of a project we are running to reduce weight in all our products as we update our designs.
The data we’re using comes from the appendix of the Household Waste Prevention Toolkit, which is a handy document aimed at local authorities. The toolkit (which is a PDF document) contains practical action points and supporting statistics. It’s very detailed and it could help to inform your thinking on domestic or community waste reduction… (click on the image)
The TED video is a follow up to the “inconvenient truth” presentation that catapulted Gore to environmental stardom in 2006. This new set of slides reemphasizes the urgency for action to prevent global warming. According to Gores research, things aren’t getting better but are worse than first thought. However in the face of all this ‘doom and gloom’ Gore draws inspiration, reveling in the fact our generation now has a mission worthy of its existence. He shares the idea of future generations looking back and saying that we were the generation that stood up and took action. For me personally it was a pretty inspiring talk and definitely gave me a little twitter. It is 30 odd minutes but if you have a spare lunch break I recommend giving it a watch, it will pick up your afternoon.
Lighting is a hot topic when it comes to energy conservation. There has been a big push to move to CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) energy saving bulbs: this is great step in the right direction but there are some real exciting prospects for the future of lighting.
LEDs (light emitting diodes) have had a big name in energy saving circles for a while now and they have been seen as the number-one contender to be the light source of the future. They are efficient and long lasting, if a wee bit expensive. Now, however, there is a new kid on the block, Luxim’s LIFI bulb, and if it lives up to the hype, the LED bulb’s time may pass before it ever really began.
Check out this clip or read this Treehugger article for the low-down.
The idea of Cradle to Cradle design has been around for a while now, see article Cradle to Cradle is 6. Since 2002, the ground breaking work by William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart has made a a huge impact on the materials industry. Material ConneXion, one of the biggest material databases in the world has recently begun collaborating with MBDC and EPEA to create the first Cradle to Cradle materials library.
A GLOBAL PLATFORM FOR CRADLE TO CRADLE DESIGN
Given today’s demands for more socially and environmentally conscious products and materials, it is important for companies to positively define their global impact and be leaders in environmental performance. Recognizing the value of each other’s expertise, Material ConneXion, MBDC and EPEA have joined forces to create the leading global platform for developing innovative, sustainable and Cradle to Cradle materials and products. Read more »
The Sustainable Materials Programme at the Centre for Design, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has one of the best programmes of practical research and development you can find. They developed the Ecospecifier service over several years.
I remember the hospitality of RMIT staff and students when I made a research trip to Australia back in 2003, where I met a bunch of designers just starting to develop their thinking on sustainability at the time, coached by Kjell Grant.
This excellent online resource by the Sustainable Materials Programme is worth a look if you are interested in specifying sustainable materials (click on the logo)…
April 2002 saw the arrival of one of those rare books that stays interesting and relevant long after its publication. It seemed to have an instant impact on the small world of sustainable design. But looking back it’s better described as a slow-burner: its impact is still apparent as the issues it discussed are shouldered by a growing community of designers.
I bought my copy of Cradle to Cradle a year later, in April 2003. It’s been a touchstone ever since: at Pli, terms like ‘downcycling’ and ‘nutrients’ still permeate our discussions.
Here’s a question for you: if you have read Cradle to Cradle, what have you done that you can say is a direct result of the ideas you came across in its rather heavy plastic pages?
The breaking news were delivered by German weekly newspaper Die Zeit: Philippe Starck is “fed up with his job and plans to retire in two years”. The renowned designer went on further to claim that “design is dead and his work ‘unnecessary’”.
Well, there are people who hate the French designer and others who adore him, as is the case with star names in any business. Some of those tree huggers out there might even be celebrating. Blogs are filled with outraged people arguing that they will not accept Starck’s confession, for he has done so much damage and made so much money out of it. I will approach this piece of breaking news from another angle. Read more »
Inspiration posts