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Far left Bas van Abel of Fairphone delivered a speech at the Design for Planet Festival
Left The Design Council brought a variety of speakers and sectors together at this year’s festival
Below The entrance to the University of East Anglia’s Enterprise Centre
governments need to trust that the energy is there.’
Sophie Whitney representing Regen, a not-
for-profi t Energy company (currently working with the Welsh government on energy policy) told us about their work supporting communities in developing local sustainable energy infrastructure, like community ground source heat pumps. ‘Where they work well, they reduce their consumption from the energy grid by 68 percent...If you have enough of these replacements across millions of homes then you reduce consumption across the region and people are less impacted by price shocks.’ So here are tangible solutions already in
are not trusting the tech. We need batteries and EV chargers being used in everyday situations. T e market should be designed in ways that service the users. T e challenge is getting the sector greener but, in addition, regulation and power companies and
play. T e same was true in a session on product design, mediated by Alice Fisher, design editor of T e Guardian. I’ve written about Smile Plastics here before, but I hadn’t realised quite how far the pair who run the company from its Welsh HQ, Rosalie McMillan and Adam Fairweather, have gone in their mission to make their high quality panels not just fully and locally recycled and recyclable, but also desirable. Said Fairweather: ‘We’re constantly collaborating with customers to meet their aesthetic needs, working closely with them on their own waste. We love to have our products sent back (to be further recycled). T e recyclability of our materials is paramount. All of our materials, if we get them back, we can recycle them into something new.’
It was exciting to hear about Smile’s expansion plans, tapping further into the
conference theme: collaboration. Said McMillan: ‘We have great impact here in the UK and it’s building. If we are going to make huge changes on an international scale then it’s all about us partnering with international companies on the manufacturing side of things as well as sales and marketing.’ On a smaller scale – but also benefi tting from international partnerships – we heard from Edward Bulmer, founder of Edward Bulmer paints, which has ‘sidestepped the petrochemical food chain’ in their manufacture. ‘Polymer chains require carbon,’ he explained. ‘But there’s no reason why we should only use fossil carbons. We take waste straw and wheat as our carbon sources. And we build a polymer chain to react with the plant sugars.’ T e company works with Auro paints, in Brunschweig, Germany, using their toxin-free paint bases but with an English palette. One of the paint’s USPs is transparency: it has an ingredient list. Bulmer said: ‘Paint normally has no ingredient list. T ere is no legislation requiring that. But we do it voluntarily.’ Bulmer also puts the breathability (SD) value on the paint (another USP). ‘We have an SD value of 0.1.’
Many of these talks are available on the Design Council’s website. I thoroughly recommend you dose up on them, to boost your own levels of that precious commodity.
designcouncil.org.uk/ our-events/design- for-planet-festival
Another massively polluting industry is textile dying. T ere is much more work to be done here, but panellist Sophie Ward, one of the team of synthetic biologists behind Colorifi x, gave us reasons to be hopeful. She cited an example which involved ‘taking the genetic sequencing of the blue in a parrot feather and, through bioengineering, growing that colour in the laboratory. T ere are 12 traditional pigments that artists have used and they are all we need to off er the full spectrum of colours.’ T e idea is that if only plant materials are involved in the dying process, when the waste is ejected into the environment, these elements will be ‘recognised by microbes in the area to help break them down.’ T is is just a tiny snapshot taken from the inspirational presentations and individuals encountered at UEA’s Enterprise Centre, one of the UK’s most sustainable buildings (by Architype). And they all played their part in sustaining a new emotion I have named, relating to our climate crisis, thanks to Katie Tregidden. Reading from her book Broken: Mending and Repair in a T rowaway World, she recommended moving forward with not blind faith but ‘stubborn optimism’.
DENISA ILIE
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