Designtex

Recycling & Reuse stories this week

Ever thought about cutting scraps leftover from the manufacture of leather garments or furniture?  OK, probably not, but some scientists have recently been thinking about its value. A new study in Green Chemistry (2012, Issue 2) has shown it can be recycled into a medically useful material. Leather hides (and their scrap) contain a protein called collagen, found in all mammals. Researchers were able to extract collagen from leather waste and turn it into a variety of regenerative medical items such as sutures, fibers, threads, films, gels and sponges. While more research must be done before collagen from leather could be commercially viable, this interesting study shows that high-value reusable material can sometimes be found where you least expect it.

 

Architect Lina Bo Bardi has given us a completely recycled factory in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The factory has been repurposed as a community space run by SESC, an organization that manages the 1.5% payroll tax that is levied for social and cultural projects (SESC is described in more detail here). The surrounding community had already been using the streets around and through the abandoned buildings as a gethering place. With SESC funding, the space has been transformed into a culture spot, called SESC Pompeia, with a theater and other performance spaces, sports area, and a library lounge, among other amenities. Way to reuse an old barrel factory, Brazil! 

 

Not to be outdone, the Dutch are in the news this week regarding the reuse and repair of household objects and appliances. A social project as much as an environmental one, the "Repair Cafe" concept brings together skilled volunteers with people who have things that just need to be fixed  (an old iron, a vaccuum cleaner, you name it). The main Repair Cafe is held several times per month in an Amsterdam community center, but its success has spawned thirty additional sites across the Netherlands and calls have come in to its managing foundation from throughout Europe with requests for information on how to start similar initiatives. As skills about simple repair of household objects have declined in this heavily service-based non-manual-labor society, the Repair Cafe project allows neighbors to pass on such skills, or at least the fruits of them, to other neighbors, all while decreasing waste-to-landfill.  

(Psst, anyone in NYC want to start a Repair Cafe here? I'll be the first customer!)

Hands in the dirt

Spring planting at Designtex's HQ is underway this Earth Week. A New York City roof garden is usually windy, and sometimes dry. But we are planting some hardy vines and staking and trimming our roses, as well as pruning the wild birches! If you're ever nearby, please come visit us and join us out on the terrace.

New Plants

Tools

Francesca repotting herbs

New butterfly garden bed

Ferns

Pruned river birch branches

Chicks-n-hens

Creeping roses, dusty millers, and water tower backdrop

Million Trees Campaign Japanese Maple, with herb garden

 

Employee lunch spot!

New Offset Wind Project Supported by Designtex

This April marks Designtex’s third year of carbon neutral operations!

We continue in our partnership with NativeEnergy, a leading provider of carbon offsets, renewable energy credits, and carbon footprint consulting. Since 2000, NativeEnergy has brought essential funding to more than 50 community-based renewable energy and carbon reduction initiatives, with corporate support from companies like ours.

As a Project Supporter for NativeEnergy’s Help Build^tm carbon offset projects, Designtex previously brought funding to the Greensburg, Kansas wind farm project as well as the Wewoka, OK landfill gas-to-energy project.  This year, Designtex is supporting the Iowa Farms Wind project, which features the construction of two 1.6 MW wind turbines on family farms in northern Iowa. The project will generate enough power to meet the needs of 5,200 homes, and is expected to reduce an average of 9,000 metric tonnes of carbon emissions per year for the first ten years of operation.

NativeEnergy assessed Designtex’s total operational footprint for 2012 according to the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Greenhouse Gas Protocols. The resulting footprint of 4,207 short tons of CO₂ emissions includes all facilities’ energy use, business travel, employee commuting, freight (inbound and outbound shipments), and waste. A summary chart is available on Designtex’s website here.

 

The Iowa Farms Wind Project from NativeEnergy, Inc. on Vimeo.

Product Stewardship and EPR consensus

Recently three product NGOs came together to hammer out several important definitions in the product stewardship arena.  The Product Policy Institute, the Product Stewardship Institute, and the California Product Stewardship Council convened stakeholders from across North America to harmonize these concepts and align them with international definitions. Please use these definitions when referring to the lifecycle impact of products and the producers who make or sell those products:

Product Stewardship:  Product Stewardship is the act of minimizing health, safety, environmental and social impacts, and maximizing economic benefits of a product and its packaging throughout all lifecycle stages. The producer of the product has the greatest ability to minimize adverse impacts, but other stakeholders, such as suppliers, retailers, and consumers, also play a role. Stewardship can be either voluntary or required by law.

Extended Producer Responsibility:  Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a mandatory type of product stewardship that includes, at a minimum, the requirement that the producer’s responsibility for their product extends to post-consumer management of that product and its packaging. There are two related features of EPR policy: (1) shifting financial and management responsibility, with government oversight, upstream to the producer and away from the public sector; and (2) providing incentives to producers to incorporate environmental considerations into the design of their products and packaging.

 

Welcome Spring

Designtex's NYC headquarters and our rooftop terrace are welcoming spring!  Stellar blue jays are visiting, employees are getting out the spades and soil, and our river birches, planted in 2007 as part of NYC's Million Trees Campaign, are getting a few buds.

  crocus and moss and river birch

Rose hips and the Empire State building

River birches and Japanese Maple are stretching their branches


Our first tulip came out this week

Herbs are returning.

More to come... after we clean up and do some spring planting.

Things to Watch 2012 (literally)

Just in time for the weekend, here are some films and clips to view, or to mark on your calendars for 2012 screening opportunities!

 

FILMS 

Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic?

I am looking forward to this film about the ubiquitous-ness of plastics in everyday life. It has won a few documentary awards in the past year, but so far I’ve just seen the trailer. However, it’s coming next month to public television. Check here for your local station’s air date. It seems to have some humor to it – always a good sign! 

  

Into Eternity

This documentary looks at the first underground permanent nuclear storage facility being built in Finland. Named Onkalo, or “Hidden Place” in Finnish, the repository will start receiving waste in 2020.  Once the facility is full it will be sealed for the next 100,000 years – the amount of time that current science deems it will take before the waste is no longer hazardous. This haunting film reminds you that the modern human has only been on the planet 50,000 years. Some of our oldest built structures like the pyramids are 5000 years old. Construction on Onkalo itself began in the 1970s and will continue into the 2100s. How will future generations maintain the site?  In 2012, this film is screening around the world at film festivals and university programs. It is listed on Netflix but currently only available to “save.” I've saved it!

 

Living Downstream

Like the previous two films, this documentary looks at hazards of our waste stream, more specifically how chemical waste wreaks havoc on our environment and then links back to human health in the form of cancer and endocrine disruption. This film (which was adapted from Dr Sandra Steingraber’s book) also reminds us that the links between cancer and our environment STILL have not been given enough funding or scrutiny. 

 

VIDEO CLIPS of Beauty 

German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck plays tree rings on a turntable. There is intervention here, he is not straight-up playing the slices of tree rings, but has assigned values to the shapes of the rings. The result is beautiful audio that gives rise to the thought "if trees could talk." 

 

A TED talk I have found myself returning to from time to time is Photographer Rachel Sussman’s depictions of the world’s oldest living things. Somehow I am comforted by these elderly trees, ancient moss, and hundreds-of-thousands-of-years-old bacteria, especially in the face of Into Eternity’s reminder that our hazardous waste will be here for 100,000 years, and Bag It’s reminder that our plastic waste seems never to go away. 

What's Good 2012

It’s early 2012 and “out with the old, in with the new” permeates everything from television programming to exercise routines.  So “The State of Green Business 2012” is no exception.  I find myself paging through this year’s report, by Joel Makower and the editors of GreenBiz.com, looking for signs of progress over the last. 

And there is one: Green Power Use, which tracks renewable energy as a percentage of all electricity generation, has moved up a notch in 2012, as growth in energy sources from solar, wind, small hydro, and biogas try to put a dent in our dependence on fossil fuels.   Designtex played a small part in this rise of renewable energy, by purchasing offsets that kept us operating carbon neutral and also helped Commercial Brick Company in Wewoka, Oklahoma to convert their kilns from natural gas to landfill generated biogas.

That’s the good news.  The not-so-good news is that across all other indicators (represented here in bold)  GreenBiz reports that the state of green business is either flat with last year, or has dropped down a notch.  Working with three levels (swim, tread, or sink) the summary presents plenty of room for improvement, as well as reasons to be optimistic that there’s more promise behind the indicators than the empty life-preservers would lead us to believe.

For instance, Clean Energy Patents continues to be in the “swim” in 2012, as does Green IT.  This says to me that where technology and innovation are involved, green business is holding its own, at least as the product or service comes to market.  Using the Designtex Environmental Design way of thinking,  we would say Clean Energy and Green IT are doing good things in their useful life phase.  But Green IT can be said to fall down in the manufacturing and end-of-use phases of its life cycle, since the E-waste it generates, and the Toxic Emissions it contributes to are both in the “sink” category. 

Where’s the optimism to be found?  Well, if Transparency and Corporate Reporting are still going strong, as GreenBiz says they are, consumers will have even more data on which to base green purchasing decisions, and businesses with toxic waste or emissions to clean up will be motivated to make sure their manufacturing and end-of-use practices are not in conflict with their green products and services.

Any disconnect like this along the life cycle of green products or services has recently become a much a bigger risk for green businesses and, if addressed, it has the potential to be the catalyst for innovation and improvement.  So Packaging Intensity

and Fleet Impacts,
instead of continuing to tread water in years to come, can become opportunities for business to show that they have really imbedded sustainable thinking in their processes. ( I think of 2011 stories like Scott’s no roll tissues and Cascade Sierra Shippers truckers as showing the way, respectively on these issues.) 

The heft of the full Green Biz report suggests that consumers won’t be satisfied until their goods and services are good and do good from the raw materials extraction phase to the take-back stage.  When old products become new raw materials for the next generation of truly good goods, that’s when everything will be going swimmingly.

Welcome writeup1...

We had a goal, a dream if you will, to provide the world with the simplest solution to turn any painted surface into a dry erase canvas.  Back when this journey started a few years ago we sat around a non-descript conference table and discussed our goals.  It started with the environment, which is always the way things start here; the product must be the most environmentally friendly option available.  We moved on to discussing color which led us to clear being the right answer.  Let the customer decide on the color they want.  Next we had to consider the trade and decided it must be easy to install.  We were left with the following list of goals:

Most Environmentally Friendly option available
Clear
Easy to Install
Single Component - Pour and Paint
Works on any Flat paint
Works on any paintable surface (over flat paint)

 ...so the journey began.  We started with a single component oil based paint which met many of the goals, but certainly not all.   A two-part, tinted, water based option was developed, but this too did not quite meet our goals.  We continued to push and chase our Holy Grail of a single component, environmentally friendly, low VOC, easy to install dry erase paint.  After we went from chemist to chemist and paint manufacturer to paint manufacturer searching high and low we saw a glimmer of light.

Finally, we found it. Welcome writup1, low VOC, clear, easy to install, single component dry erase paint!

Stay tuned for upcoming promos, information and news, until next time here are some quick links to learn more:

writeup1 resource

writeup1 installation video

Textile Standard aligns

Inspired by Healthy Building Network's comparison of Chemicals of Concern lists in the green building arena, I created this Venn Diagram to show a comparison between the NSF 336 Sustainable Textile Standard's chemical hazards, and how those overlap with other pertinent lists in our industry. 

As we can see, there is much overlap. Aside from a few particular concerns, there is almost a consensus on what are the primary chemical hazards in this arena. From this we can take heart that NSF 336 is a robust standard, which, if met, will answer to the many existing standards and restricted substances lists at large today.

LBC= Living Building Challenge's Red List

EPA= Environmental Protection Agency's Chemical Action Plans

Keeps getting hotter in this kitchen

Today's disturbing story: the U.S. Department of Energy has calculated that 2010 showed the biggest increase of greenhouse gases on record. Worse, the figures are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by the International Panel on Climate Change four years previously. China and the US are implicated as the biggest contributors to last year's jump, due to more travel and manufacturing in those two countries.

What does this mean when many world leaders are already ignoring the IPCC, Kyoto, Copenhagen, et al? One can only guess. However, with Durban talks looming, and Rio+ 20 next year, I'm hoping that climate action finally gets kicked into a higher gear.

In a previous post, I noted that the UN's Green Climate Fund (intended to help poorer countries afford the technology needed to adapt to climate change), was at that point underfunded by the rich nations who had pledged money at COP 16. However, the Economist published an article today that states the fund is more robust than previously thought.  This does not mean rich nations are fulfilling thier promises at Copenhagen though. Apparently there are discrepancies about where money for the fund should originate (public money, private money, with strings, without strings, etc). Interestingly though, the article quotes Andrew Steer, special envoy for climate change at the World Bank, as saying:  "The world of action on climate change is a long, long way ahead of the world of negotiation.”  [He seems to be talking about financial action rather than treaty or regulation actions].  I'm not sure I agree... the one silver lining noted in today's AP article is that the developed countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol greenhouse-gas-limiting treaty have reduced their emissions overall since then and acheived their goals of cutting emissions to about 8 percent below 1990 levels. While the limits definitely need to be ramped up, it shows that diligence and binding treaties can pay off.