In the realm of carbon-neutral consumer items, there’s the biodegradable furniture made by Artishok, a team of Dutch design students. It’s based on the Cradle to Cradle philosophy, whose central idea that industrial processes and products can be engineered so that waste is all but eliminated; everything is either recycled or rots:
The Artishok design studio embodies this perfectly, creating furniture from corn based plastics. Artishok’s products look no different than other designer stuff and the advantage of the Artishok items is that they virtually do not contribute to your carbon footprint. After use, you can safely throw the furniture on your garden’s compost heap without polluting the soil even 1%. That means that the eight students are about as close as any designers to replicating the natural cycle directly. There’s likely strong demand for such items because other than recycled materials, 100% natural materials effectively eliminate the garbage problem. C2C based items can be ´fed back´ to mother nature no questions asked! Artishok buys its materials from Biopearls www.biopearls.nl, another Dutch enterprise which makes biodegradable polymers.
C2C has turned the design world on its head in some ways. Everybody agrees that the throw away society must be stopped, but C2C appears to clash with durable design. Because unlike durable designs which seem to deny a product’s end point, C2C is sold primarily because of its ‘rotting away’ value. Critics say that it’s the trash heap nightmare, and not nature, which inspires this and that C2C is merely a marketing ploy. Some people also believe that nature doesn’t need extra compost. That might very well be true, but [C2C gurus] McDonough and Braungart aren’t too extreme. They say that so long as you create stuff that can be re-used by industry, you might consider it on equal terms with biodegradable materials. Every item that´s not ending up in a rubbish dump helps solve the landslide problem.
This is psychologically a bit disconcerting; as noted above, people like to buy things that last, not necessarily things that are compost-ready. This conjures up images of mushrooms growing under the cushions, nature surreptitiously crossing the threshold of the home – a bulwark against the wild – and waiting to erupt. (This may be the reason that though my wife bought me the C2C book a couple of years ago, I have yet to read it.) But those kinds of associations are part of the problem – the idea that we can erect walls that separate us from nature is a fallacy. If economically viable, the compostable couch is a great idea. The only problem is, I don’t know any suburban compost heaps big enough.
