Garth Johnson runs the irreverent ExtremeCraft website, "A compendium of Art masquerading as Craft, Craft masquerading as Art & Craft extending its middle finger." He's also the author of 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse: Remake, Restyle, Recycle, Renew. And in his TED Talk entitled "Recycling Sucks! The History of Creative Reuse" Garth points out that recycling is the last of the three R's (the first two being "reduce" and "reuse," of course) and ought be done as a last resort only.
To be clear, Garth's not anti-recycling, but we've all seen just how resource-intensive and inefficient recycling can be, in no small part due to human behavior (an unwillingness to pre-separate recycleables, for instance). Despite the sensationalist title, the point of Garth's talk is to show examples of creative reuse throughout world history, going way back to the Romans and coming up to present day.
This is one of your longer TED Talks at nearly 20 minutes, but it's worth sticking with; you're bound to get a chuckle out of some of the re-carved statues in his slideshow, and I guarantee you'll learn a thing or two.
The furniture pieces you see here all look quite old, but in fact, they're brand new. They're all made by Furniture from the Barn, a Pennsylvania-based outfit that gets their raw material, as their name implies, from no-longer-used barns.The family-run business works with a local Amish concern that takes down...
Now and then something appears in the local pages of Italian newspaper that deserves English translation. This is from the Turin section of today's La Stampa:A new eco mall will double the size of Turin's Eataly From green cars to sustainable food to bio-clothesBy Emanuela MinucciOscar Farinetti [the founder of Eataly]...
Of the five Hong Kong design outfits Thomas Lee shot for his CoSPACE CoCREATE video series, at least three are relevant for Core77 readers. The first is his look at KaCaMa Design Lab—that's ID'ers Kay Chan, Catherine Suen and Match Chen—on their mission to re-use post-consumer waste. To that end,...
I'm sure I'm not the only person who hides the Brita when company comes over and feels terribly guilty tossing those carbon-filled plastic filters every couple of months. In fact, it's always been a bit of a mystery to me why there wasn't a beautiful, more sustainable and affordable alternative...
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