Image: Chip[s] Board Parblex Plastic Samples – Photo credit: Chip[s] Board
Fashion tech innovator, writer and public speaker Brooke Roberts-Islam investigates the pioneering designers utilising food waste to create stylish design, furniture and accessories.
As the pressure rises to tackle our global sustainability issues we are learning more about how food waste is contributing to climate change. The Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations reports that “Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted.” Not only is this a humanitarian and social crisis, but it is also an environmental one. When we waste food, we also waste all the energy and water used to grow, harvest, transport, and package it. If the food decomposes in landfill it produces methane, which contributes to global warming.
Fortunately, there are some brilliant initiatives that we can all sign up to, like OLIO, that allow us to donate unwanted food locally, but what of the masses of food on an industrial scale that goes to waste, sometimes before even hitting supermarket shelves? This is where ingenuity and creativity offer some of the most inspiring and effective solutions, by way of fashion, furniture and interior designers committed to smart and sustainable design.
Chip[s] Board was co-founded by Rowan Minkley and Rob Nicoll after they conducted a series of potato waste experiments while at Kingston University, aiming to create new sustainable materials. What began in a wheelbarrow in Minkley’s back yard has now developed into a materials business with a specially designed London-based lab. They have recently produced their first collection of materials ‘ParblexTM Plastics’, combining potato waste, pine flour, coffee grounds and other waste materials into recyclable and biodegradable ‘bioplastics’, which contain no toxic chemicals. Parblex is designed to be used for fashion and interior design and has already been used in Cubitts spectacle frames, furniture and clothing fastenings.