Exquisite to look at and good for the environment — from recycled blown-plastic vases to the trendiest vintage online marketplaces

Dip your toe into the pool of sustainability
Lily Worcester20 September 2018

Conscious living

Amy Powney, founder of fashion lifestyle brand Mother of Pearl, gives her tips on how to live more sustainably

Change your energy supplier to a green energy company. Ecotricity and Good Energy are both great. The electricity they supply is 100 per cent green and their gas is frack-free. One fifth of Ecotricity’s supply is generated from its own windmills and solar panels.

Fit a water filter unit under your sink. I have a reverse osmosis kit under mine, but make sure you get one that puts the alkaline back into the water. It’s about £400 but so worth the investment. While you’re at it, a reusable water bottle is essential — S’well has some beautiful options.

MOTHER OF PEARL homewares, from £125

For your weekly food shop give Riverford or Farmdrop a go. Both use no or minimal packaging, not to mention being organic and locally sourced produce.

Where possible, opt for natural fibres over synthetic. Natural fibres biodegrade much quicker than synthetics and don’t release plastic microfibres into the ocean.

Paper perfect

Like the idea of covering your bedroom in wallpaper but cringe at the idea of all those trees being cut down? Fear not. The thoughtful people at Graham & Brown ensure that for every tree used, three are planted. The area around the paper mill it uses is able to continually supply wood to the factory, and no new forests are felled. So get pasting.

(grahambrown.com)

The kids are alright

Eco Birdy’s mission is to get our littl’uns thinking about recycling from the get-go, and why not? In Antwerp, founders Vanessa Yuan and Joris Vanbriel have started an initiative where unwanted plastic toys are collected in schools and made into children’s furniture. Donators are asked to leave their email address so that they can be informed when their toy has been given its ‘new life’. And for the really keen ones, there is also a sweet picture book about the recycling process.

ECO BIRDY furniture, from £107

Spring Greening

According to both UK and US environmental protection agencies, the air in our homes is on average three to five times more polluted than outside, thanks to the harsh cleaning products we use day in day out. Enter Tincture. Its 100 per cent natural and renewably sourced cleaning products are not only glorious to look at but are wonderfully toxin free.

TINCTURE All Purpose cleaning spray, £7.50

Beyond Retro

Don’t have time to traipse around Kempton for those second-hand hidden treasures? No problem. From the comfort of your home take a gander at these exquisitely curated online vintage marketplaces. Why buy new when you can reuse?

<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnf76SIAZ1K/?utm_source=ig_embed_loading">View this post on Instagram</a><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnf76SIAZ1K/?utm_source=ig_embed_loading">A post shared by The Kairos Collective (@thekairoscollective)</a> on Sep 9, 2018 at 1:40am PDT

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Back to the Future

Natsai Audrey Chieza, founder of biodesign company Faber Futures, explains how biology is helping designers develop better products

Biodesign is the practice of designing with biology. It can take on many guises as designers, artists and scientists experiment with biological systems to explore new ideas and create new products. Biotechnology companies already engineer yeast to produce pharmaceuticals, flavourings and fragrances, and in recent years, start-ups have shown how designers can utilise DNA — Bolt Threads is turning spider silk into high-performance yarn, Modern Meadow engineers collagen for liquid leather, and Colorifix creates biological pigments for textile dyes.

Fabric dyed using bacteria by Natsai Audrey Chieza

By making our materials from living systems, we can let nature show us how to build new systems of manufacturing for interior products. In these examples, biology demonstrates an inventiveness evolved over the past 4.8 billion years to replicate, recycle and replenish better than any system we’ve ever engineered.

Clean your walls

Little Greene’s water-based paints (right) contain some of the lowest VOC levels in the industry (that is a very hazardous compound that you definitely don’t want to be sniffing); its oil-based paint, meanwhile, has been reformulated with sustainable vegetable oils. Little wonder this independent British manufacturer is leading the eco-friendly paint charge. It doesn’t stop there. Its glorious wallpapers are made using material sourced from sustainable forests and the pigment used on the paper is non-toxic.

POP goes my heart!

Selfridges has a strong record on sustainability, and once again its Conscious Creators beautifully curated interiors pop-up does just that — beeswax sandwich wraps (£13) by Apiary Made, bamboo toothbrushes (£4) by Zero Waste Club and champagne buckets by Ecopixle (£95) are on the agenda, with everything sleek and not a hessian sack in sight.

Until 17 Oct (selfridges.com)

Signed, sealed, delivered

There is a plethora of exciting brands taking innovative approaches to packaging. Take beauty and lifestyle brand Floral Street: its tubes are made from 75 per cent sustainable sugar cane bioplastic, while its fragrances are packaged in cartons made of fully recyclable paper.

FLORAL STREET Iris Goddess bodywash, £18

Plastic Fantastic

Plastic? Material of the year? Quelle surprise! Thanks to a group of out-the-box sustainably conscious designers and some extraordinary cutting-edge techniques, this controversial material is going through a renaissance — when recyled, natch. Go and see why at London Design Fair’s Material of the Year: Plastic exhibition. Until 23 September (londondesignfair.co.uk)

Design Fair’s Material of the Year: Plastic exhibition

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