Eco–chic chairs
Two simple chairs, both classics of design – a traditional ladderback chair with solid wood legs, seat and back, and a chair with a moulded plywood seat and back and chrome–plated steel legs – illustrate these differences.
The wooden ladderback chair, which might be anything from a simple, rough–hewn example to the elegant version created by the Shakers in eighteenth–century New England, was made from wood grown in local forests, which regenerate themselves naturally. The timber was taken to workshops nearby (sometimes in the forest itself) and the chair was made using simple tools that consumed a minimum amount of energy. The beeswax finish and any glues needed were local, animal–based products.
Employment of craftsmen living nearby sustained the local economy as well as the woodland. Any wood waste was used to make smaller items and fuel, or in animal bedding. If the chair broke, it could – and still can – be repaired, using simple skills. When it was finally disposed of, the whole chair would rot to produce safe and regenerative organic matter – an example of a closed loop, a benign life cycle that does very little damage to the environment.
The plywood and steel chair, on the other hand, has a negative impact on the environment. The steel for the legs contains iron ore – a finite resource that requires energy to mine, transport and refine. More energy is used to transport the ore to a factory, where it is made into steel tube. This is transported to a stockholder, who sends it on again to be formed into legs, which are sent away for chroming – a high–energy process that produces toxic waste.
Meanwhile, in another part of the world, trees are felled for the plywood seat. The wood is transported to huge machines for slicing into thin veneers; these are laminated together under heat and pressure, using dangerous chemical glues to bond the sheets into plywood. The plywood is taken to another factory where it is moulded into the seat and back – again under considerable heat. Here they are coated with a range of polyurethanes, PVCs and solvent coatings.
When the plywood and steel parts finally meet, the result is a chair that is almost impossible to repair – although some steel may be recycled. When its relatively short useful life is over, the chair ends up in a landfill site and leaches pollution into the ground as the chemical glues and chrome degrade.
The right choices
Most of the items used to furnish and decorate our homes undergo a wide range of processes in their manufacture, including colouring, dyeing, printing, treating and washing, as well as that huge waste generator – packaging.
Our two chairs demonstrate the essential principles that link design choices to the global environment: the consumption of natural resources, the use of energy during production and transport, by–product emissions either as solids, gases or liquids, and the longevity of any product in both its useful and waste states. These are the issues we need to consider when choosing and evaluating items for our homes.
The realization that nearly every object used in making and furnishing our homes has an impact on the environment makes the need for ecologically sound choices all too clear. There are essentially two positive approaches we can adopt in order to make safe, healthy homes and protect the planet. We can take inspiration from traditional techniques of building that have proved safe for centuries and existed before the industrial revolution. And we can seek out the growing number of exciting new products that are starting to be developed by a new, twenty–first century industrial revolution.
These ‘clean’ processes imitate nature’s closed–loop cycles to avoid resource depletion, pollution and waste. Such methods make cleaner, safer artefacts that are the way to healthier homes – and a healthier planet.
This is an extract from 'Green Design: A Healthy Home Handbook', by Alan Berman
