Breaking: PepsiCo makes a petroleum free soft drink bottle. Not made from the regular non-plastic plastic and often gen-moderated corn starch, but with raw materials as switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. How about by-products from Pepsi’s food businesses (potato peels from chips, orange peels from juice) as material?
What to do when you’re writer and are asked to make an exposition? The analogue website is the paper version of the website you’re visiting now. No fancy font but by hand, no pictures but the real thing, no weblinks but a post-it for you to take home. To be touched from August 28 at Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam in galery Aanschouw. I’m nr. 1 in 10x Van Lieshout.
A homeless person in the tram inspired Ramon Middelkoop to make a durable version of the brown paper bag. He saw the dirtiest bag ever, but it kept its charm. The biologically tanned leather bag is handmade in India. Towards becoming Cradle to Cradle certified, the distributor takes the bag back once you’re fed up with it.
Islands depend on resources transported in from the main land. Six countries will do it differently. Goal of the ‘Cradle to Cradle Islands’ is to be selfsustainable in energy, water and material by the year 2020. Heleen Sombekke: Large opportunities in Blue Energy that emerges when salt and fresh water mingle here. Both are all around without the need for transport.
Gum on the pavement, gum on your shoesole. That’s why Schiphol Airport stopped selling chewing gum. Designer Anna Bullus sees advantages. She makes Gumnetic, made of sterilised chewed gum and bioresin. Her Chewy Pad is a pillow that acts like memory foam. How to harvest the material? Check out her Bubble Gum Bin.
November 14th the NUTEC fair opens in Frankfurt. Here Michael Braungart will not only present the second Cradle to Cradle book that will surely become a bible. There will also be 400 new products that are produced following the protocol where waste=food. Here’s the Terry towel, Returnity fabric Pure Origin underwear and the Bend Bench.
What to do? Drinking coffee out of a porcelain cup is no longer the greener choice, unless you drink four times from it without doing a washing up. The paper or plastic cup is better. Or: less bad since it’s still waste. I count on Stepah bioplastics for the next cup. Owner Fred Slettenhaar promises “plastic” made from whey, a milk plasma leftover when making cheese. Go go cheeseheads!
‘Recycled urban furniture is ugly,’ says industrial designer Eline Bijleveld. For VelopA she made BendBench, a bench that follows the Cradle to cradle protocol. It’s all about easy dismantling of the product. After 10 years of life, steel will be steel again, zink is recollected by using sustainable chemicals. The technical cycle is closed.
As paperfree offices tend to be only paperless, large printer manufacturers like Océ and Xerox are developing ink that will disappear after 24 hours, so that paper can be reused up to 100 times. Good, but how does this add up to the unhealthy particles printers already spit out? Michael Braungart told me that Océ is also producing a printer that actually cleans the air. On show at Nutec c2c fair.
A two hour exclusive interview with Michael Braungart, the cradle to cradle guru, tomorrow in Rotterdam. I’m feeling panicky. What an opportunity to ask him about his new book, what he feels about C2C not as a total solution but as only part of a proces to make implementation more practical, and what a designer who cannot pay for Braungarts chemical support can do to get involved. PS where did Bill McDonough go?
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