Biodegradable Lids Turn Tin Cans into Useful Household Containers

Many a green home has repurposed tin cans in various rooms, holding pencils or kitchen utensils. But what if you could just pop lids onto them and make them even more versatile, so they can be used as surprisingly chic vases, toothbrush holders and soap dispensers?

Northumbria University graduate Jack Bresnahan designed this set of nine biodegradable plastic lids for tin cans, exhibiting them at graduate show New Designers in July.

From Dezeen:

Green issues are at the heart of everything that Jack Bresnahan does.  A passionate believer that designers  must take responsibility for their designs from conception to disposal, Jack feels that ‘anything that ends up in landfill is simply poor design’.

His aim through his designs is to create products that make environmentally friendly goods more accessible and help to make day to day living greener. This is not a blinkered crusade however, as while his designs are always created within a green framework he balances this with a drive to develop products that are both useful and good to look at.

Not only do the lids decompose, unlike regular plastic, they turn tin cans into modern home accents that resemble expensive designer stainless steel products. Since the lids themselves are small, they use fewer resources to create than standard household organizers – plus, they take tin cans out of the waste stream.

This is definitely one concept that needs to be in stores ASAP!

Link [Dezeen]

Chewable Pampers Spoof – Smells Like Dinner Time!

Do you ever wish the products you use were so green, you could eat them? Be careful what you wish for… In this wacky SNL spoof, an “eco” mom uses diapers so biodegrable that they’re actually edible – for dinner!

Cradle to Cradle Design: 100% Biodegradable Furniture

In the last few decades, furniture has gotten incredibly wasteful. Think about how many crappy items you’ve purchased – tables, chairs, desks, bookshelves – that were made with such cheap materials in such a shoddy way that they fell apart after only a few years. Such throwaway furniture has increased the amount of crap that piles up in landfills day after day. You might think that going back to sturdier, more well-made furniture is the answer, but what if we could have 100% biodegradable furniture that could just be composted in your garden after you’re done with it?

Triplepundit has it:

A recently created design house by eight Dutch design students has embraced C2C fully. The company, called Artishok, has just completed its first designs after spending months researching the best 100% biodegradable materials for modern furniture.

The team was directly inspired by William McDonough, an architect, and the chemist Michael Braungart, the two inventors of C2C. The duo believes that another Industrial Revolution is at hand which is concentrated around ecological production methods.

The Artishok design studio embodies this perfectly, creating furniture from corn based plastics. Artishok’s products look no different than other designer stuff and the advantage of the Artishok items is that they virtually do not contribute to your carbon footprint. After use, you can safely throw the furniture on your garden’s compost heap without polluting the soil even 1%. That means that the eight students are about as close as any designers to replicating the natural cycle directly.

Because they’re made of 100% natural materials, they eliminate the garbage problem completely. Can you imagine, millions of people across the world never throwing another piece of furniture in the trash? That’s the direction we need to go in, for sure.  I can’t wait to see more furniture designers embracing the cradle to cradle concept!

Link [Triplepundit]
Photo credit: Flickr user jetheriot

High School Student Finds a Way to Biodegrade Plastic in 3 Months

Holy awesome! Some high school kid in Canada came up with a way to bio-digest plastic shopping bags. For a freaking science fair! Amazing. 500 billion plastic bags are produced worldwide every year, and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. We’re all aware of the fact that plastic bags pose a lot of problems – they clog up landfills, choke marine life and are seen floating in water far too often. Finding a way to get rid of them is huge.

From The Record:

Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

“Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high numbers in nature.

Daniel ground the plastic bags into a powder and mixed it with ordinary household chemicals, dirt, yeast and tap water to encourage microbe growth. For three months he allowed the concentration of microbes to increase, and put the culture into three flasks with strips of plastic bags. Six weeks later, he found that the bags weighed an average of 17 percent less. Not satisfied with that result, he continued working on the solution until he isolated his most effective strain of plastic-eating bacteria and got a result of 43 percent degradation in 6 weeks.

What a cool example of how innovation can come from the most unexpected places.

Link [The Record]
Photo credit: Flickr user scottwyden

Boeing Proves Their Bombs Don’t Just Kill People, They Put Out Fires!

Nobody ever said Boeing engineers aren’t smart. They’ve come up with a way to make C-17s into firefighters that drop collapsible, biodegradable containers of water onto blazes – putting fewer human firefighters into harm’s way. Beach-ball sized ‘water bombs’ are stacked on pallets within cardboard containers.

From Boeing:

The unit’s spherical shape minimizes airflow resistance. Each sphere contains 50 pounds of water and easily remains intact while it falls true to target. The spheres burst on impact at the heart of the fire. A single C-17 PAFF mission could airdrop 140,000 pounds of water on multiple “hot spot” targets-equivalent to nearly 100 helicopter deliveries.

“What’s more,” said Cleary, “the C-17 can airdrop from 1,000 to 2,000 feet above ground level using precision navigation and airdrop instrumentation, remaining safely away from the fire and winds,” he said. “If a C-17 were used, this delivery system is remarkably cost effective, and the savings in lives and property make it an interesting possibility for the Air National Guard.”

This is actually an incredibly cool way to control fires before they reach epic proportions – they get to the fires faster, can drop more water at once, have computer-aided targeting and can put out fires in all weather and all terrain, day and night. Considering that the other bombs Boeing is known for are meant for carnage rather than the good of mankind, we’re offering golf claps for their efforts.

Link [Boeing]

Photo: Flickr user DoctorWho