Imagination to Application

Doesn’t this video make you want to be a kid again?! It was too cute and fun not to put in here, but it does make some valid points.

 1) What was their go-to size for a car? Small!! Size is on of the biggest problems of our industry. The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability says there are three ways we as humans disrupt nature’s material cycle: The scale on which we use and discard material, the speed at which we use those materials, and the material we take from the lithosphere and give to other spheres. 

2) Its an advertisement from a company who is very vocal about their sustainability efforts. 

3) These little kids are the ones who we’re going to leave our own footprint to; what we do affects them. 

4)  They had lots of fun throughout the whole process. 

5) These little kids are also us. We’re the “now” generation, the baby designers, the interns and most importantly, the fresh ideas. We’ve been taught about these issues and it is our chance to turn our field around. 

William McDonough and Michael Braungart have created Cradle to Cradle, or C2C. The quote on the front page of the article is “Remaking the Way We Make Things”. This is only the first of many different ways to make our mark. As mentioned by Dr. Armstrong in her lecture, C2C has three main tenets: Use current solar income, celebrate diversity and waste equals food. Let’s take a look into what these actually mean and what we can do about!

I was super overwhelmed with all of these concepts, especially the first one. Use current solar income? What does that even mean? So I dug a little deeper and lo and behold Cradle To Cradle’s Certificate of Compliance popped up on the McDonough Braungart Design Company’s website. Current solar income basically means using renewable energy. Their ultimate goal for current solar income is to have all of the energy inputs come from geothermal, wind, biomass, hydro and photovoltaic energy. However, in order to be a C2C certified product, only 50% of the manufacturing process must be renewable energy, this doesn’t include transportation. Cotton has recently been under fire because the amount of energy it takes to produce. I found an article in Applied Solar Energy pointing out a solution to the manufacturing process of cotton, one of the biggest textiles of our industry. Normally, the drying process of cotton includes air heated by burning liquid fuels.  The solution? Specialized ceramics that decrease the duration of drying, improves efficiency and high-quality target output. Data shows that this method is 9.4 times more energy efficient than the former method and consumes more than 2.5 times less energy. Textile World has an article that mentions several companies that are taking steps toward renewable energy. Interface, a carpet manufacturer, has seven plants that use 100-percent renewable electricity.  Approximately 28 % of Interface’s total energy needs are sourced from solar, hydroelectric, landfill gas and geothermal energy. Hydropower provides 91% of the energy used for the fabric producer The Victor Group.  Shaw Industries has converted 18,000 plus tons of post-industrial carpet waste and wood floor to steam energy at its Dalton, Georgia plant and the list goes on.  This is so encouraging because it means companies are waking up to current environmental issues!

The second tenet of C2C, is celebrate diversity. This sector focuses on local resources and design. In our reading, Cradle to Cradle Waste Equals Food, they tell the story of how Chicago was designed. Originally, the cities that surrounded Chicago were created to provide for the city. They were “bound to the city and fueled by its needs”. How convenient is that? One of the biggest problems in our industry is the transportation of goods. A short drive to small towns just beyond the big city limits immensely cuts down on energy that would be wasted shipping long distances! It also keeps all of the rural economies afloat. McDonough’s website also says that we should celebrate nature’s diversity. This means creating designs that fit the local systems relying on local energy and material sources. He provides the example of a Gap office in San Bruno, California. The roof is covered in soil, flowers and grasses that match the local terrain. This roof also “absorbs storm water and provides thermal insulation”. The floor is raised to allow breezes to flow through while the concrete below remains cool and provides a cooling effect throughout the day. His solution coincides with LEED guidelines created to solve the heat island effect on roofing. According to the EPA website, heat islands demand more energy, increase the cost of air conditioning, create more air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and can even spur on heat-related illness.  By designing with the environment around you, you can save costs, reduce pollution and may even become healthier!

The video above is just a glimpse into the third tenet: waste equals food.  The focus of this proposition entails many details but we will specifically focus on the idea of biological and technical metabolisms and then up-cycling. According to our reading article, Cradle to Cradle Food Equals Waste biological metabolisms are ones that are useful to the earth. Technical metabolisms are items like metal that contribute to the “technosphere”. The problem with technical metabolisms right now is that they cannot be recycled back into earth. A C2C solution is to design products from the beginning to be recyclable as technical “nutrients”. The article says that too often packaging materials are deliberately designed to not break down under natural conditions. This is creating huge problems in landfills. When these technical items were scarce like during the Great Depression, people would save and reuse jugs, aluminum foil, rubber bands and more. To this day, my Nana still reuses foil and ziploc bags - items that I take for granted and tend to just throw away even if they barely had been used! This saving up of technical resources stopped when the technology came about to create cheaper materials. It became easier to just create the product than create a place to collect and clean these items for use. What causes the biggest problem is when these two metabolisms are combined to make one product. It makes it hard for the metabolisms to break down into its natural components. The article provides the example of a shoe. Shoes used to be tanned with vegetable chemicals that were biodegradable. Unfortunately, this took a long time and chromium tanning was its replacement. However, vegetable chemicals may be making a comeback. In a YouTube video I found called Fab Flash, the host was telling about top designers who were practicing sustainable practices. The shoe designer, Manolo Blahnik has created sandals and shoes that use vegetable-dyed leathers that also have natural textured soles. The next topic and my favorite is up-cycling. According to The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability up cycling is when material is remade into a high-quality material. 

An article from PR Newswire tells all about the company Jackpot. Jackpot uses recycled plastic bottles to create dresses. One dress equals nine and a half recycled plastic bottles. The dress to the left is made with two types of polyester one of them being from recycled plastic bottles and the other a pre-consumer recycled polyester-production bi-product. Both of these polyesters spare the environment and are considered alternatives to cotton and linen. Jackpot also creates a new donation shirt every season – for every shirt they sell during the season, five euros or six dollars and thirty-two cents will be given to poor children in Bangladesh. Another way to up-cycle can be found in your own backyard and is the reason for posting the video you just watched. Taking used scraps of materials and turning it into an entirely new piece. This weekend in Perkins, Oklahoma, I found an antique store called Rusty Barrel Vintage Furnishings. They open only two weekends a year and this store is an absolute treasure - smack in the middle of Oklahoma and luckily close enough to me to dig through! The owner turns dressers into benches, barn doors into coffee tables, whiskey barrels into sinks, skis into chairs and much more. Among all of his creations are random materials that allow you to be creative. I bought an old wooden cable spool and turned it into a side table, shown above. These products tell stories and allow you to share your own design inexpensively, all while being environmentally friendly!

Overall, as designers we need to go back to the basics. We should come up with solutions to create a better process. Our products should be designed to be recyclable. The Food to Waste article gives an example of parts of a chair. After its useful life, consumers can easily tear off the fabric and throw it into the compost. That’s how all of our products should be. This is our field so we should be making it easy for the consumer. An article from The Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management has data that proves consumers who aren’t interested in sustainability won’t look into it and that people buy based on look and not durability or comfort.  However, results did show that 81% were interested in purchasing sustainable clothing in the future because they want to be eco-friendly consumers. I think that’s a number we can work with!