Fall 2004
Trash to Ca$h
by Christine Roka
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Western student Breanna Guydotti made a dish scrubber from six-pack yokes and the tops of plastic Hershey’s milk bottles. |
Atop David Hull’s desk, a sketchbook rests with its pages exposed, revealing the clean, bold lines of lamp designs. Page after page, different versions of the lamp, resembling the Eiffel Tower, slowly evolve into a final design. Hull, a junior at Western Washington University, fashions lamps out of discarded boat-sail scraps and steel rods.
Hull is enrolled in Zero Waste Entrepreneur, a class Western offered for the first time this fall, in which students design and construct products from 100 percent waste. What makes Zero Waste Entrepreneur different from other industrial design classes is that it includes a marketing component.
Although approximately 50 colleges in the United States teach industrial design, Western is the only school that has a planning in sustainable design minor for environmental science and industrial design students and one of the first to offer a class like Zero Waste Entrepreneur.
As Ryan Jorgensen, a Zero Waste student, explained the class requirements — the construction and marketing of 10 products in six weeks — he folded creases into a shopping bag sewn out of company advertising banners. Jorgensen said CDI, a sign design and fabrication facility in Bellingham, donated banners for his project. Although CDI recycles some of its old banners or uses them as tarps, many end up as trash.
“The stipulations (required us) to make it out of a reused product or something that’s thrown away,” Jorgensen said. “We’re just trying to take stuff people don’t know what to do with or that’s not properly being recycled or something that can easily have another life and giving it that life.”
Arunas Oslapas, an associate professor and the industrial design program coordinator in the engineering technology department, started teaching sustainable design at Western in 1995, the first year of the International Design Resource Awards. This competition, based in Seattle, encouraged participants to design using recycled and environmentally conscious materials.
“My class and I entered that first competition,” Oslapas said. “There were entries from the Czech Republic, Japan — all over.”
After winning several awards from the IDRA, Oslapas said he knew he was on the right track in helping his students and the environment.
“This is a socially environmental way to do things,” Oslapas said.
Not only did he serve as juror in the IDRA, Oslapas entered the competition twice. He received second place in 1998 for woven baskets made of metal strapping from shipping containers.
Oslapas’ former student Kari Erkkila, who works as a technical design specialist at Teague, won an award at the 1995 IDRA for designing rain shoes called “water beetles,” which she
constructed from rubber tire inner tubes.
IDRA founder Tom Johnson said: “Sustainable design means different things to different people. I think that’s great — I’m glad it’s really complicated. It’s resisted any kind of image, and you can tell really good sustainable design when you see it; it involves a lot of creativity.”
The IDRA temporarily ended in 2003 because of a lack of funding and
sponsorship. Since then, Oslapas and the department have inherited more than 200 projects from past competitions, including a backpack constructed from rubber inner tubes, a bowl made from an old vinyl record, a sleek-looking bamboo chair and a paper dress.
“Last fall, we had a warehouse filled with 400 items from the competitions. It was more than we could manage,” Johnson said. “We began looking for someone who had a larger facility that could house it, essentially. Arunas was interested in taking some of the items.”
Oslapas said, initially, recycled products lacked visual appeal and usefulness.
“The quality level of the products needed to be better,” Oslapas said. “There’s a need for industrial design students to understand marketing and retail sales. Too often, students will make products for themselves — they need to know that the market drives designs.”
So Oslapas decided to incorporate marketing into his class.
“This year is the first time we’re doing this sort of thing,” Hull said. “We just want to look professional. We don’t want to come across as a bunch of kids that make cheap products.”
Students sell their finished products at the Whatcom Museum of History & Art during the holiday shopping season. Prices range from $15 to $40, and the museum collects 40 percent of each student’s consignment sales.
Midway through the quarter, Zero Waste students scramble to finish their products and prepare for the museum debut.
Breanna Guidotti, a Zero Waste student, shares a cramped work space with Jorgensen.
Jorgensen rhythmically peddles the worn, industrial-strength sewing machine as he stitches rigid, straight lines along the edges of a banner bag.
Guidotti’s desk is cluttered with piles of Hershey’s milk bottles and the plastic yokes that hold six-packs of cans. She crafts scrub brushes by folding 10 yokes into a circle, fastening them with plastic zip ties and attaching them to the top of a cleaned, de-labeled milk bottle.
“The issue of sustainability deals with perpetuating life, social equity, economics and everything that has to do with our existence and how it harmonizes everything else that we do here on earth,” Oslapas said. “A lot of times, companies or businesses will hit one or two of these really well, but ignore the other part.”
Wendy Brawer, a former juror for four IDRA competitions, said the award
competitions have positively affected sustainable design in industry, but even though designing eco-friendly products reduces production waste, consumers still are throwing away overwhelming amounts. While several European companies have started to assume responsibility for a product’s entire life cycle, Brawer said U.S. companies have avoided
product recycling.
Back at Teague, Erkkila said sustainable design is stereotyped as being more expensive to mass produce and that opportunities to manufacture recyclable items in the U.S. are limited.
“A lot of companies don’t have the funding and don’t see it as a worthwhile investment,” Erkkila said. “There are a lot more (sustainable-designed) products than there were 10 years ago, but because of mass consumerism in the U.S., it’s a lot harder to push sustainable-designed products into the market.”
The Zero Waste classroom teams with energy and anticipation as Oslapas makes his way to each workstation and evaluates student products. Oslapas said he might change the program’s schedule next year to allow more time for students to
experiment with materials.
“Finding the object is easy—just go to three or four different places and you’re bound to find some type of scrap material,” Oslapas said. “Working with it is harder, and it takes more time to refine the idea.”
Oslapas pulls on an old zipper attached to a pouch constructed from discarded fabric scraps. Watering cans made of coffee cans and tool handles, candleholders constructed of bicycle wheels, bulletin boards made from kayak remnants and rubber tire inner tubes—Zero Waste students are busy turning trash into cash.