Reclaiming Tires: Design Within Reach Style

As a part of Design Within Reach’s new business strategies, they’ve been pushing hard to get eco-friendly products to the market. This new product from their rubber tire line was inspired by by the fact that “Americans alone toss out about 300 million tires every year.” These products are modeled using ancient leather-crafting techniques and actually made in Egypt. They are hand-cut and hand-sewn wile being useable indoors and out for planters, carrying containers or simply durable storage. Each container is durable and unique, offering a functional alternative to the landfill. To quote the folks at Design Within Reach, “the big thinkers of the world are working on creative ways to reuse this vast quantity of rubber – ideas include mixing ground-up tires with urethane to create sidewalks or burning them like coal to produce energy.” Their goal is to take this concept to the consumer market, creating smaller but important opportunities for material reuse in the product design industry.

CES Goes Carbon Neutral?

Any eco conscious designer who has been will tell you it’s a trip. We couldn’t help but laugh when we saw the lifted, pimped-out pickup with TV’s in the wheel wells. If you looked hard enough you might have stumbled upon a small, tucked away section called “sustainable technologies”, a glimmer of hope. Aside from Nokia, Dell and HP, many large corporations had no environmental message. Consisting of about 140,000 people, this event is one of the largest in the world. For 2008, CES purchased $110,000 in carbon credits in an attempt to “offset” their impact.*

*Carbon credits are not a substitute for sustainability.

National Geographic Explains e-Waste and Recycling

This month’s National Geographic features a very informative article on e-waste called High Tech Trash. We highly recommend this read to any designer or business owner working in the electronics industry.

Click here for the full article.