South African 'green' art in the White House

Barrydale is a small South African town in the Overberg district, home to art collective Magpie. They make fantastic light fittings by hand, using reclaimed materials. Helen Brain wrote on Tuesday in TechnoTimes that "it was their 2-metre-high regency-inspired chandeliers, on show in the New York store Anthropologie, that caught the eye of the interior designer commissioned to decorate the Obama family's quarters in the White House." So now there's South African rubbish in the White House. (Not to be confused with the South African rubbish Brandon Huntley in Ottawa currently making news headlines.)

Magpie's are not the only South African light fixtures made from discarded items, though they might be the most elaborate. A while ago I discovered that Nzola Brand Cafe on Church Street in the Cape Town CBD (a wonderful nook for breakfast or lunch) has been fitted out with light fixtures made of plastic found washed up on the city's beaches. I believe they can be bought at the shop next door, so if you are looking for that sort of thing, I suggest you check it out.

sustainable packaging

Packaging needs to catch up with product development in moving towards improved sustainability performance. There are consumer pressures mounting in the right direction, and it has been predicted that sustainable packaging will make up 32% of all packaging by 2014. There are even carbon taxes on packaging in the Netherlands. But this is not just about reducing the amount of packaging material used, or even using recycled and recyclable materials. It's about finding creative ways to design packaging with a cradle-to-cradle perspective, in many cases imagining future uses that are completely unrelated to the original purpose of the packaging.

There's a brilliant set of examples, evaluations, interviews and principles in the book Designing Sustainable Packaging by Scott Boylston.

For those of us who are not package designers, it's a good idea to be aware of these examples and guidelines so that we can be discerning consumers. So what follows a 'list of lists' on better package design.

recycling is not only for households and offices

South Africa has a lot of catching up to do on reducing waste. Cape Town is the first municipality in the country to develop a by-law and calculate the cost for integrated waste management. The city's landfill sites are almost full, and its 3.2 million residents produce up to 6 000 tons of waste per day. But recycling is not yet routine for most of the population, and very little has been done to reduce product packaging.

There is some movement now in the area of construction waste. Machines to crush concrete for reuse in new construction projects have been available in South Africa for a decade, but demand for the crushers has only taken off within the past year, as contracters start to see the financial benefit of recycling concrete. Particularly in Cape Town, but also in other centres, it is becoming too costly for large volumes of concrete to be dumped - so apart from the environmental impact, there is now a financial incentive to change waste disposal practice.

Now the National Waste Management Act, passed earlier this year, deals with waste in all its manifestations. It stipulates requirements for recycled material in new buildings, and also provides for certain products to contain specified proportions of recycled material.

The voluntary Green Star building rating system gives credit for recycled content in buildings, but this will be the first emergence of a legal requirement. Coupled with this will be stiffer penalties for illegal dumping. [Source: Construction World, April 2009]

The Act is an outcome of the National Waste Management Strategy and the 1997 White Paper on National Environmental Management. In its objectives, the White Paper defined a hierarchy of waste management practices that remains a key principle of the waste management policy:

• Reduction of waste at source;
• Re-use; Recycle; and
• Safe disposal as a last resort.

The Act will start to apply these practices.

surplus containers

It may be time to go out and buy a shipping container for conversion into a dwelling or office. Something I've thought would be a nice project, if I had the time, and not terribly expensive. They are used all over South Africa as instant shops and offices, most commonly in informal settlements and construction sites, but what about taking your house with you any time you moved? Even across the ocean, since the containers are made for shipping.

the three Rs return

As long as I can remember, we've been told about the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. At some point we've added Repair (to extend the life of a product) and Repurpose (when it isn't suitable any more for what it was made for, use it for something else). That's all very well, but most products aren't designed with this in mind, so it's difficult to take the mantra seriously. With the focus on carbon though, we're starting to move from cradle-to-grave analysis, as a way of looking at a product's lifecycle impacts, to cradle-to-cradle analysis that is intended to encourage products to be designed never to enter landfill sites.

Buildings are given recognition under green accreditation schemes like LEED, BREEAM and Green Star for being designed so that the materials that go into them can be used for something else when the building is disassembled. Products can also be C2C certified, which means they are designed not just to be carbon neutral, but to produce zero waste: either recycled or reused endlessly, or returned to a natural, ecologically benign state. If things are designed this way, then the three Rs become a meaningful paradigm, and the goal of zero waste might just become reachable.

new lives for old products

Looking for inspiration on how to reuse products that have been discarded or reached the end of their first lives? Superuse is an online community of designers, architects and everybody else who is interested in inventive ways of recycling. Users are encouraged to register and submit their own examples.

measuring green performance can be tricky

Sustainability is about performance, not about picking the "correct" technology. No individual strategy is right for every occasion - it's a question of what moves the world forwards instead of backwards. Responding to a Popular Science ranking of America's 50 greenest cities, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging raises the interesting challenge of how to define "forwards" and "backwards", and makes a few initial suggestions:

• Instead of measuring the amount of electricity coming from renewable sources, compare energy use with GDP: who's getting most prosperous using the least energy?
• Instead of counting how many people use public transportation, measure vehicle miles traveled per capita and car ownership rates: we should be reducing the need to travel, and distance travelled.
• Instead of assessing the best buildings in a city by counting the number with green accreditation, assess building codes and what the average building is like.
• Instead of assessing how comprehensive recycling systems are and how much material they take in, consider the percentage of solid waste that still goes to landfills: we want to reduce total waste, not just increase recycling.

Unfortunately for the politicians, it's often the more mundane actions and low-profile strategies that make the biggest impact. They are also harder to measure, but I believe we'll have to try.

the road to fame

Pop rock meets tarmac. Well, not exactly the music, but the CDs. Industrial-strength recycling for an industrial juggernaut.

we'll pay a high price for the world's cheapest car

If I was in the market for new wheels, I suppose I'd be pleased that Indian car manufacturer TATA (which includes South Africa as one of its markets) is planning to release the world's cheapest car. Just as the original Volkswagen Beetle was developed to provide transportation for the masses, the new 'People's Car' is expected to be cheap enough to achieve the same objective in India. It's expected to sell for £1,200.

This is bad news: not good for the energy crunch, or carbon emissions, or urban life in general. We don't need more cars on the roads, we need fewer. And those that are on the roads must be more efficient. One of the biggest problems with vehicle emissions is that cars are so darn heavy. Most of the energy they use is to propel the car, not the people inside. I haven't seen the numbers, but at a guess I would say that if you could reduce car weight by 50%, you would probably use less fuel than the current generation of hybrids.

Enter Hyundai, whose QuarmaQ concept car uses new materials and manufacturing methods to reduce weight. If you read the details, though, you'll see that the weight reduction is a measly 60kg - the equivalent of one passenger. Hardly a big deal, but credit for trying. They have also replaced some toxic materials with more benign ones, and one QarmaQ re-uses approximately 900 PET bottles that would otherwise become landfill.

The next stage would be to replace the plastic panels with biodegradable panels: now that would be environmentally responsible. It probably wouldn't be any lighter, but it could still be greener. After all, a big part of the environmental impact of a car is not its emissions from driving, but the emissions generated in its manufacture, the space it takes up in landfill sites, and the toxic chemicals left behind. Imagine a car made from modified corn starch - if you damage a panel in a collision, just unbolt it, stick on a new one, and throw the damaged one onto the compost pile.

I am not making this up - the Mini-Bimoke uses biodegradable panels impregnated with palm tree seeds. And there's a new tyre manufacturing technology from Yokohama that enables them to make tyres from orange rinds.

compostable utensils

I can't believe it's taken this long, but I have finally eaten my first meal with biodegradable utensils, at the Stellenbosch Organic Farmers' Market today at the Stellenbosch Waldorf School. The supplier claims that compostable plates, bowls, knives, forks and spoons will degrade in ideal composting conditions within six months or less, depending on what they are made from. The cutlery is made with plastarch (PSM): modified cornstarch combined with several other biodegradable materials. The cornstarch is modified in order to obtain heat-resistant properties, making PSM one of the only bioplastics capable of withstanding high temperatures. They even feel stronger than a lot of petroleum-based disposable knives and forks that I have used.

Other products suppplied by Green Home are made from polylactic acid (PLA) or bagasse. Frankly, I am amazed that more caterers and retailers aren't using these products.