SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By Happyzine Sustainable Design columnist – Lee Barry, Wellington, New Zealand

Water, aqua, H2O. Call it what you like, it’s essential to life on Earth and – as I discussed last week – to human survival.
Its been a watery week here in the Capital – plenty of it has fallen from the sky that’s for sure. Strangely, its been the kind of rain which your average brolly might actually survive – that is, downwards rather than side-ways rain – which is a shame since my brolly went missing during our last damp period.

My interest in a replacement was piqued by promotions for some new kind of “in-destructa-brolly” –  with blunt points and higher wind resistance. The Blunt umbrella is the invention of kiwi Greg Brebner who saw a problem – and designed a better solution. While he was not initially inspired to make a “green” product his design has sustainable spill-over. Apparently between 50 and 80 million umbrellas a year – per country – end up in the bin. This new, more robust product is bound to have longevity and reduce such waste, but the price tag of nearly a hundred bucks will challenge many – like me – who are in the market for a new brolly. You know, the price would feel better if the company could certify their materials, production process and labour standards as sustainable. Maybe I’ll ask them, because the alternative seems to be supporting the disposable umbrella culture (gasp – no!) – or perhaps just being happy to be damp. As my mother-in-law says in her broad Scottish brogue: “You won’t melt!”

And indeed I did not melt as I escaped a rain-slicked Courtenay place on Thursday night to be transported to “planet water” by the sensational film “Oceans”. If you want to be awed by water, this is the movie to see. On display was plenty of incredible photography of the almost unbelievable underwater creatures you’ve never seen – but most cleverly touching were the many portraits of marine mammals, shown playing, hunting and socialising in eerily human ways. The filmmakers didn’t need to try much harder to evoke our sympathy when the pollution and overfishing pictures came up later.

I was reminded of the well-documented great Pacific Ocean plastic garbage vortex which is being highlighted at the moment by the epic journey of another innovative design – the Plastiki. The Plastiki is a slightly mad but admirable venture – a crossing of the Pacific in a yacht made from over 12,000 discarded plastic drink bottles. The philosophy is perhaps more important than the boat as a design product: the team aim to highlight cradle to cradle production, and raise awareness of ocean pollution, particularly plastic that is so toxic, harmful and plentiful. The boat is tipped to complete its journey this weekend and sail into Sydney harbour on Sunday July 25th.

So, what about all those plastic bottles? Some of them will no doubt be water bottles.

Bottled water is a contentious topic that attracts much debate, mostly due to the questions around whether life’s most essential compound after air should be owned, let alone packaged and sold for profit.

But leaving those debates aside for another time, there’s simply the issue of the empty bottles themselves as waste – 50 billion a year in the US alone. While travelling in Africa some years back I had mixed feelings when our tour truck attracted trails of village kids eager for our empty litre-sized Evian bottles – they were a commodity, a useful re-usable container. That’s because the plastic they are made from is so enduring.

A few companies in New Zealand have approached this issue by sourcing plant-based plastic (PLA) for their bottles, rather than the usual petro-chemical variety. Life Inc and Charlies both offer such “compostable” water bottles in earnest attempts to “do the right thing”. In reality they complicate recycling efforts and ignore the root of the problem – water is and always will be free and flowing from the tap. Why pay 1,000 times more and create waste in the process just to get a drink of water?

The design innovation of the week is something everyone can do; take a bottle from your recycling and refill it with water before leaving the house. You’ll be well on the way to saving the world!

Tags: sustainable design