In today’s world of overflowing information and complex interwoven processes, environmentally-committed businesses have a growing number of challenges to tackle. In such business environment, life cycle analysis (LCA) has come to be considered as a helpful device.
It is the conventional understanding of the notion of ‘device’ that has led Pli to carry out an investigation into alternative approaches to LCA. The traditional perception defines this ‘device’ as an operational tool, whether physical or electronic (i.e. software), used mainly to calculate input and output, therefore inevitably focused solely on manufacturing. Instead, during the productive time of my internship at Pli, we strived to develop a method that could embrace as many sides as possible to a product development process.
Now the initial findings of this investigation have been gathered in a white paper format, and is here for everyone to review (click here).
Scotland’s Innovative Craft group have organised an exhibition of sustainable products with One Eco Home for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival. They are showing the Grass cabinet as an example of sustainable furniture design.
Bamboo and straw domestic cabinet
If you’ll be in Edinburgh in August or September, get along to the Dovecot Centre on Infirmary Street. Open 4th August to 27th September, Mon-Sat 11am-6pm.
This week we welcome Tim Maughan to the team. Tim recently finished studying Nottingham University where he completed his product design and manufacture degree. He is working with Pli for the next few weeks, looking into sustainable packaging options and packaging life cycles for our products.
We chose Tim for this project due to his experience in sustainable packaging. He developed a strong concept for a sustainable Heinz Ketchup bottle. Have a look at that and some more of his work on his Coroflot portfolio page
On Wednesday this week, our colleague Eray Cayli presented his research into Utility Furniture at the Green and Trifty seminar organised by London Remade. If you’re a product designer, a design student or simply somebody with an interest in sustainable design, you’re sure to find his insights persuasive and inspiring.
Eray’s central point — as I understand it — is that the Utility Furniture scheme applied austerity measures not only to material supply and manufacturing processes, but also to the creative freedom and experimental curiosity of designers in that period (1942 - 1952). Imagine being constrained for 10 years of your working life by design committees staffed by bureauctratic appointees.
Are we risking our liberty to explore and develop new designs, materials and processes as British designers of the 1930s had done, unwittingly? If design professionals won’t moderate their own environmental impact, who will do it for them? Would it be possible for restraints to be applied centrally by governments or trade authorities to limit our work for the benefit of a low-carbon economy in the future?
Importantly, Eray has also spotted opportunities that arose from the Utility scheme, particularly for small local manufacturers who benefitted from a shortened supply and distribution network. They picked up the business that was previously aggregated by the big producers in High Wycombe and London’s East End. Will we increasingly make a virtue of local supply and short journeys?
You can download Eray’s presentation directly here. We’ll be podcasting the audio and slides in the next few days, once Eray has settled back in Istanbul.
If you want to follow up on the research into Utility Furniture and its application to new resource-efficient manufacturing business models, contact Pli or comment here and we’ll pick up the conversation with you.
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 »
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.
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…
Pli’s latest products are now available through the UK’s leading online sustainable furniture retailers. A group of new and established retailers are offering eco-friendly furniture and homeware for competitive prices and we are really pleased to have been chosen as a supplier to so many already this year.
You can find selected designs from our Grass, Reee, Hoop and Twist ranges at Nigel’s Eco Store, One Eco Home, The Greenhaus and Hidden Art. More retailers will be stocking our products soon and we will be announcing them over the next few weeks.
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.
Here’s a link to Home-air-purifier-expert.com, a site which goes some way towards explaining the reason why Pli adds no formaldehyde to any of our products, in glues, binders, fillers, coatings or paints… (via Treehugger). Exposure times to industrial emissions of formaldehyde are limited by law. Prolonged exposure even to small quantities of formaldehyde is thought to cause health problems.
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.
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 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)…
I love a tidy house, yet I am not the tidiest person in the world. My solution consists of having less stuff so there less to tidy. I set a rule up to help me organise a room; if it can’t be tidy within 5 minutes (10 minutes with a dust and a vacuum) some stuff has to go. This is all well and good, but what effect does my aversion to clutter have on the planet? Maybe this article on the Unclutterer Blog will help me answer my question.
Unclutterers are tree-huggers
A person who abhors clutter — and knows that it saps energy and detracts from the more important things in life — already has the first and most important of the three “R”s down pat. Reducing your personal consumption also reduces the amount of “stuff” you’re contributing to the waste stream. Without all that excess baggage, maybe you won’t need to move into a power-guzzling McMansion to house your worldly goods.
Pli was invited to talk at the sustainable design seminar held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London on 4 March ‘08. I made a short presentation about the Reee chair to an audience of very well-informed and engaging product designers, design students, interior designers and manufacturers.
You can download all the presentations, including my slides, from the London Remade site (click on the logo).
In case you missed the Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code event, called ‘Fixtures and fittings for a greener office’ then you can download the presentations from the London Remade website now. The seminar was held on 31 March 2008 at The Wellcome Collection. London Remade is a valued supporter of Pli and many other businesses, and well worth a look if you are not familiar with their work.
Click on the logo to visit the London Remade site and download the ‘greener office’ slides.
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?
This video is a really good conversation about collaborative design. Cameron Sinclair talks about projects he has worked on in Africa where creative thinking has made a big difference in people lives. His idea of ‘Open Source’ design uses the internet to create a free flowing creative environment where ideas can flourish without the restriction of geography.
Bamboo is the un-official poster material of sustainable design. The article Bamboo, Part II: What’s so good about the stuff? from Core77 gives a quick rundown of the benefits of this versatile grass. However the most interesting part of the article is in the comments section.
It’s worth mentioning some of the negatives:
Bamboo varies hugely in quality. Younger bamboo is much softer, but much cheaper to produce (faster harvest cycle = more bamboo).
Bamboo is glued together with adhesives that are very often toxic. It’s a Chinese product and not seriously regulated. Some Bamboo (i.e. Woven Strand process which has more glue in it) was banned in Europe because of excessive VOC (volatile organic compounds) released into homes - including formaldehyde.
Also, in some places, bamboo has become so over harvested, the indigenous population which relied on bamboo for their homes, their food, their tools and so on are being starved.
It ain’t as pretty as it looks!
A recent piece of writing I had read in a Turkish newspaper reveals it all about a personal greenwash. The Stockholm correspondent of this newspaper had sent an article about the poshness of being green in the Swedish capital, in which she told how “in” it was to go down on the street, to the recycling bin, and finally to recycle your waste, and let everyone see you during the process.
While that seems to be the case in Western Europe, one would find it really difficult to hold onto a green lifestyle in Turkey, since there is a huge lack of awareness of the issue. However, as careless are the businesses and people in Turkey about sustainability, a newcomer to the UK might get just as tired of seeing so many words like green, eco, sustainable, etc. It’s big business here. Read more »
Choosing furniture is not just simply a matter of aesthetics and function. The time has come when we all have to think about the impact your lovely new dining table may be having on the environment. Below is an except from Treehuggers-How to Green Your Furniture which gives you the top ten tips on being more responsible when purchasing furniture. My personal favourite is number three, but hey I am biased. :) (see our Grass and Hoop series).
Sian Berry, the Green Party’s candidate for Mayor of London in this year’s election, visited Pli’s workshop on 17 January to discuss sustainable manufacturing opportunities and small business development for London enterprises.
Sian was interviewed here by BBC London news and she has written about her reflections on her visit in the New Statesman magazine.
Inspiration posts