Design world goes green and 'meaningful'

Plastic chairs are sold around the globe. But today, that "plastic" might actually be a vegetable compound as the design world increasingly embraces "green" and "meaningful" production, experts in the field say.

"For both consumers and creators, interest in 'the sustainable' is growing each year," said Franck Millot, director of the annual Paris Design Week - a huge showcase for the latest trends in global furnishings and decoration.

"A designer doesn't just create beautiful objects, they also think in terms of improving daily life," he said.

Typical is French architect and designer Patrick Nadeau, a pioneer in urban hanging gardens and plant-based design.

"Plants, vegetable material, with their colors, their matter, their translucence, they help create awareness, a living, evolving framework," he said.

In France's Champagne capital of Reims, he won kudos for an environmentally friendly social housing project.

Despite strict budget constraints, the homes were all made of wood and incorporated plants and sloping earthen walls - as well as optimal orientation - to enhance thermal insulation, lighting and harmony with nature.

The concept harks back to the 1920s, when visionary US architect R. Buckminster Fuller advocated that "less is more" and that design should be "anticipatory" to help solve world problems.

Fuller's notions hit home with the 1970s oil crisis. The embargo the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries slapped on industrialized countries over US involvement in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War suddenly cut back supplies.

As a result, these nations began to rethink their dependency on oil.

For Nadeau, the post-oil "energy transition" is also a responsibility for designers and architects.

"We must embrace these questions, if not we'll resign ourselves to old standards rather than consider new ways of living."

One who has taken up the challenge is Kartell, the high-end Italian design firm that has upheld plastics as a "vector" of modernity for 70 years. In April, it launched its first "biodegradable" chair made from plant-based waste and microorganisms.

"Such eco-design allows you to produce without destroying, it's part of our strategy for the future," Kartell President Claudio Luti told the French daily Le Monde.

The switch often involves a high-tech reinterpretation of age-old plant matter like linen fabric from flax, hemp, jute, seaweed and vetiver, an easily woven fibrous root common in Madagascar now much in demand in Europe and the United States.

Centuries ago, resistant linen was pressed in successive layers to make armor for Alexander the Great and painting canvas for the world's great masters.

Today it is mixed with resin to produce snowboards, chairs, helmets and car doors - an eco-friendly substitute for products once reliant on fossil fuel-based carbon and plastic-based fiberglass.

Similarly, tough jute is used to produce the solid hulls of boats.

Other materials find a second - often classier - life through "upcycling", a movement to repurpose old or discarded objects so they do not add to the world's garbage mass.