Category Archives: Sustainability
Designing Global Light
European architect André Brössel has come up with an alternative way to harvest solar energy to the solar panel: an enormous glass ball that focuses sunlight (and possibly moonlight) to a concise point to gather energy. It’s mostly gotten people excited because it’s not only supposed to be more efficient than many solar panels, but it just LOOKS SO PRETTY:
image taken from designboom.com
Many places are claiming these balls are large enough to harvest energy from moonlight, but one of my engineer friends says it’s a pretty large claim. As far as I can tell, they are still in the early stages of fully figuring out the limits of the design system, but there’s already a great amount of interest in utilizing the final product in buildings and spaces where design is just as important as function. If they are, in fact, more efficient than solar panels, expect to start seeing these EVERYWHERE!
Want to know more? See more photos and read information about the balls here.
Poking the corners,
Jenna
Eat your waste!
Sometimes exploding the box isn’t about creating something completely new, it’s about re-envisioning what we’ve got in a different way. Two men in Melbourne, Joost Bakker and Danny Colls, have done just that by starting a zero-waste café called Silo that uses a $30,000 composter to turn all waste produced in the café into compost. The interior is made from recycled and reclaimed furniture, and there is no back kitchen area, all the food is made in front of the communal counter for the customers. Bakker and Colls have arranged with their suppliers to get their food, milk, and alcohol delivered in reusable containers that get sent back to the supplier after they are stocked, and have no trash bins in the whole place. Over the course of the first week, they had less than a half cup of waste, and that was from patrons leaving things behind.
Photography: Pip Grenda
Why is this incredible? Think about the amounts of trash that are produced where you work, or where your friends or family work, on a daily basis. Think about how much money people spend on stuff that just ends up being thrown away after it’s used. Revolutionizing the production line to eliminate the concept of waste is a HUGE step forward for any business to take, and one that has an impact on all the businesses around it (for example, the suppliers had to rethink how they were sending Silo stock as well). Silo creates compost as the end of their production line, and can sell that back to the farmers that are supplying their food. Or give it away to customers. Or plant their own gardens. What would happen if more businesses decided to design their company from the end to the front to eliminate waste? The possibilities are pretty endless… Does your local favorite business worry about the end product? If not, maybe it’s time to start supporting one that does. Or you could always start your own…
Looking for the dynamite,
Jenna
Explode The Box 