Renewable Design

The industrial design and architecture industries are hungry for new sustainable options but are often frustrated with their limited availability and often misled by prevalence of greenwashing and lack of clarity and transparency about the materials’ actual performance and properties. Over the past few years, several concepts and ideas for sustainable bio-materials have been proposed for different products, ranging from furniture made from seaweed and mushrooms, to packaging boxes and construction materials made of mycelium. All of these examples came with the immense value of increasing consumer awareness, but at the same time, showed little potential for scalability, and performance, limited by existing available sustainable natural materials. True eco-manufacturing will require a completely new suite of raw materials, especially for future manufacturing aiming to make novel products not available today. One of the attributes of petroleum is that it is so complex that it has limited use in its raw form and must therefore be deconstructed to very simple molecules in a refinery to be of any large-scale utility. For plastics, there are just six molecules that come from a petroleum refinery that are used today. This chemical bottleneck limits our ability to make new materials from petroleum, without extensive chemical processing that is both expensive and environmentally damaging.

Starting from algae, we are developing a new set of materials ranging from soft foams and adhesives to hard plastics and coatings that come from renewable sources and are biodegradable at their end-of-life. These new materials are currently being integrated in the conceptual design of furniture, architectural elements, fashion items and consumer products. We are excited to support designers and architects in the challenge of rethinking the way human products interact with the environment in a more sustainable and beneficial way.