As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with its natural ecosystems and grassroots social innovators.”

The idea was to demonstrate, in both practice and at a city-wide scale, how to combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture with the metabolic energy of social innovation.

Urban Farms

A first delightful discovery: there are no fewer than twelve working farms within Zurich city limits, and one of them has a thriving herd of buffaloes (from which comes Swiss mozzarella). Several of the farms also provide educational experiences for school groups, indeed demand for such courses is more than than the farms can cope with.

The city, which owns the land, requires all these farms to produce organically. 5,700 farms – ten percent of all Swiss farms – are certified organic. The challenge faced by urban farmers, we were told, is a lack of certainly about the future. Switzerland has escaped the worst ravages of the global property crash, however one negative consequence is that the pressure from developers to biuld on the farm land remains intense. The community garden below, for example, is due to be built over by the end of this year.

Zurich’s farms distribute their produce through their own shops and a variety of Community Supported Agriculture schemes. Twenty new projects have been launched in western Switzerland alone in recent times. One of these newcomers, Ortoloco (below), is a self-managed cooperative farm with 200 active members.

Ortoloco, which describes itself as “a laboratory for economic experiment”, enables citizens to be involved actively in food growing as well as in the development of new distribution models. The cooperative works with “socially and ecologically oriented settlements”, commercial kitchens, catering colleges and schools.

The bread culture in Zurich, which dates back many hundreds of years, is especially healthy. The loaf shown above is made of wheat grown entirely within city limits. The latest arrival to the local bread scene is a new co-operative, Brotoloco, whose members make these especially elegant ovens by hand:

Seed City

Swiss farmers have played a leading role in the development of organic farming ever since Dr. Rudolf Steiner founded biodynamic agriculture in 1924. In the 1940s, Dr. Hans Müller developed the organic-biological method. And in 1974, far-sighted researchers formed the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), with the mission to underpin scientifically the observations made by Switzerland’s organic farming pioneers.

This institutional eco-innovation persists. To compliment the endless expansion of its science campus ETH, a kind of Swiss MIT, has started to create what it calls a Seed City.

Seed City (a view of the gardens is above) is a community garden initiative for local waste recycling, food production and biodiversity conservation. The plan is to create a closed-loop system of local vegetable gardens of rare and endangered crop varieties fed with composted waste from the campus and maintained by a volunteer association of students and staff. It also aims to establish a vegetable delivery scheme with organic producers in the region.

Soup By Bike

Our next discovery was a four year old enterprise called Suppen und Pedalen (Soup & Pedals).

One of the green gems in the Zurichs ecology scene, Suppen und Pedale have grown their soup delivery business from 10 litres to a 1,000 litres a day. The two-man enterprise supplies 23 organic shops and bars in the city with 40 different delicious soups all delivered on a bike. All green, all local, no additives, no premade in use!

Wild Zurich

In many industrialized countries there is now more biodiversity inside cities than there is in the countryside where the monocultures of agribusiness reign – with a dead hand – supreme.

It was a special delight,therefore, to learn of the Rucksack School. Its founder, Alexandra Tiefbacher, told our team that there are more than 1,200 edible plants in the city of Zurich. Our team determined that it would be a great idea, at the festival, to combine guided foraging expeditions with on-site workshops.

Water Fountains

Zurich’s citizens and visitors go through one billion unnecessarily bottled containers of expensive water a year. These plastic containers – many of which are chucked away in public space – take a thousand years to decompose. The madness of bottled water is especially acute in Zurich because the city is blessed with a wondrous infrastructure of 1,224 water fountains. They are well-maintained and the city publishes a variety of guides to their location.

E-Waste: Re-Make

Our workshop in Zurich contained a fairly strong “Please, no more trees!” tendency. Happily, we soon discovered a lively e-waste project in which young offenders learn how to make artefacts that are then sold online in in city shops. Zurich runs a well-organized e-waste pick-up service so there are good volumes of raw material for the e-waste re-makers to work with.

In discussion, our group felt that a city-wide festival could add two kinds of activity to the existing e-watse ecology. The first would be to extend discussion of re-making to wider constituencies. The best way to do this, we all agreed, would be to stage Maker Faire type events during the festival as an entry point.

And Next?

The map below plots the projects we were able to discover in-and-around Zurich, in a couple of days, from a standing start.

This talent-scouting for social innovation was a pilot for Part One of the festival process. Part Two would be to figure out, during collaborative project clinics at the festival itself, how these projects might improve and develop – with the skills of designers to help them along.

The idea of last week’s workshop, as explaIned at the top, was to explore how, in both practice and at a city-wide scale, one might combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture with the metabolic energy of social innovation. The ingredients – in the form of natural assets, emerging social experiments and institutional open-mindedness – are present in abundance. A seed  has been planted.

The ZHDK masters students on the Zurich Eco Lab team were: Johannes Aeschlimann; Madlaina Capatt; Eugen Danzinger; Luke Franzke; Eva Geiser; Barbara Hoffmann; Fabienne Homberger; Martina Kessler; Livia Lukacs; Daniel Menichini; Christoph Miler; Noa Stemmer-Holtz; Tina Stieger; Andrés Villa Torres; Claudia Walz; Sonja Zagermann.

John Thackara is a writer, speaker and design producer, and director of Doors of Perception. In addition to this blog, he is the author of twelve books including In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World and Wouldn’t It Be Great If…. People seem most impressed by the fact that he once drove a big red London bus.

John lives in the small market town of Ganges, in southern France, with his wife, Kristi van Riet and his dog, a Carne Corso called Dora.

Follow John on Twitter @johnthackara, by visiting his blog, subscribing to his RSS feed, or sign up for this monthly review of his posts sent by email.

Before he started blogging here, John Thackara sent out a monthly email newsletter, Doors of Perception Report, which was also about the restorative economy, social innovation and design. That newsletter’s archives are here.

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According to a 2011 study that’s downloadable here, the New York City construction industry generates 7 million tons of building materials waste each year. Of that amount, just a fraction is recycled.

Remember our entry on Reclaimed Cleveland, the operation that harvests that city’s abandoned buildings for raw materials? NYC has a similar organization in Build it Green! NYC, which is attempting to make a dent in that 7-million-ton figure. BIGNYC, as it’s abbreviated, relies on a network of volunteers to scour and sort the various things thrown away by NYC that still have plenty of life left in them. In addition to retrieving materials from buildings about to be demolished or renovated, they also take materials from surplus donors, regular Joes and even movie shoots, which explains how they’ve amassed a 75-ton collection of useable stuff.

“[We have] everything from panel doors to high end refrigerators and shutters to movie props,” they write. “Our mission is to keep these materials out of the landfill, while offering deep discounts on their resale.” Through a distribution center in Queens and another in Brooklyn, BIGNYC sells reclaimed lumber, hardware, furniture, appliances, kitchen cabinets, flooring, masonry, paint, and more.

Some examples: Pictured up top are a bunch of salvaged doors that local architecture firm Lot-Ek turned into a reading platform for architecture & design bookstore Val Alen Books. Directly above this paragraph are the original post office windows from Grand Central Terminal. Below is a shot of reclaimed Douglas Fir floor joists that they’re selling for as low as $2 per foot. And this is just a fraction of what they’ve got going.

Any NYC-based designers looking for reclaimed materials or products on the cheap, you could literally spend hours browsing their website and going through their broad range of salvage. And as BIGNYC points out, most of the stuff they have–remember, 75 tons–isn’t even on their website. But their Astoria and Gowanus locations are open seven days a week.

Designarchy is a sustainable micro studio that provides graphic design services with a small ecological footprint. Why does it matter as designers, we not only have the responsibility to learn about sustainable practices and incorporate them into our lives, we also have a role in educating our clients. So many designers look at the client for leadership in sustainability when we should be offering clients the option of using recycled paper, soy inks, clean printing, and so forth. Tania Kac believes understanding the impact of design and production choices throughout the creative process is not only imperative in ensuring a more sound and sensitive end product, but in creating alliances with your own clients who are also sustainably-motivated.

At many companies, greening products or processes boils down to a nod toward compliance requirements or an attempt to cut costs.

But at Ingersoll Rand, a $14 billion manufacturer that supplies the transportation, manufacturing, construction and agricultural industries, sustainable product innovation goes beyond compliance, giving it an edge over competitors in helping customers meet their environmental challenges.

Sue Burek, with Ingersoll Rand’s Center for Energy Efficiency & Sustainability and I discussed how her company incorporates sustainability in product design and highlights some of its green products, ahead of her online briefing today with Phil Metz, senior research partner for product sustainability and innovation with AltaTerra Research.

First, Metz explained how companies can set goals and ramp up the green design process.

Padma Nagappan: What’s the starting point for green product innovation?

Phil Metz: Different companies have different starting points. Some have sought to make their green initiatives “real.” Some have appreciated sustainable innovation as an avenue to cost cutting. A very few have begun to recognize the true potential of sustainable innovation as a source of competitive advantage and differentiation.

PN: How do companies strive for balance between economy/affordability and sustainability during the design process?

PM: I think this is a “false choice.” Our research shows that, while many companies have viewed sustainability as a burden, a few have recognized the potential of sustainable innovation as a source of profit, competitive advantage and new business opportunity.

PN: How do companies ramp up the design process for greening products?

PM: Some basic first steps:

• Set ambitions and opportunities: Develop an explicit “vision of success” for how sustainability can contribute to new products. Work across the enterprise to develop a picture of the future business environment, including top sustainability drivers and opportunities.
• Explicitly link business objectives and sustainability goals to specific product initiatives. This can be as simple as a whiteboard list with business/sustainability objectives on the left, and products on the right. Gaps will jump out.
• Build the sustainable product portfolio. Take a quick look at key metrics — Does this portfolio achieve our revenue objectives? Strategic impact? Sustainability goals? Is the risk acceptable? What are the big gaps? This can be very simple to start.

PN: What are some recent examples of how companies have made the leap?

PM: Dupont has dramatically shifted its supply base from petrochemicals to biochemicals by integrating sustainability into its product development and supply chain processes. InterfaceFLOR, a leader in carpet tile is legendary for leveraging sustainability to cut its costs and improve its products. Nike’s Flyknit running shoe is highly sustainable, woven as a single piece with minimal waste and a lot less labor and at lower cost.

PN: Can you give us some recent examples of green product innovation at Ingersoll Rand and how that benefits your customers?

Sue Burek: One of the challenges companies face in developing new innovative green products, is establishing a criteria that is both robust, delivers customer value, and has meaningful impact on the environment. For Ingersoll Rand, we have developed a holistic world-class set of criteria that we apply across a broad spectrum of products and solutions. For our purposes, our products must meet or exceed world-class standards in performance, deliver environmental benefits as well as customer value.

One of these products in our portfolio is the Schlage AD Series and CO Series cylindrical mortise locks. Because of the design of this product, the lock can be upgraded without disposing of the original base product. Because we have designed modular upgradability into the product, it allows for retention and reuse of approximately 90 percent of material lightweights. In addition to high performance, having this environmental attribute allows our customers to include the solution in their score when they obtain LEED certification.

In addition, our ThermoKing business offers an advanced transport refrigeration solution that is both environmentally progressive and delivers customer value. The CryoTech truck and trailer refrigeration units offer faster pull down to improve temperature control for operators while reducing particulate emissions. The solution also uses CO2 refrigerant recycled from industrial processes, and offers extremely low noise generation when compared to conventional diesel-driven refrigeration units. This best in class operational carbon footprint is unique in the market.

PN: How do you incorporate sustainability into the design process?

SB: The goal is to incorporate sustainability thinking as the foundation of the New Product Development process. We are moving beyond mere compliance to make sustainability a competitive advantage. For companies looking to incorporate sustainability into the design process is essential to embrace sustainability as an integral part of the design, innovation and new product development processes, and not as an incremental activity — while, of course, understanding what the customer value is.

For Ingersoll Rand, this has been a four-step iterative process. We have:

• established world-class criteria for defining metrics around a green portfolio;
• developed a product level sustainability Index scorecard from which new products are measured and tracked;
• used outcome driven innovation (ODI) to uncover unmet customer needs around sustainability; and
• incorporated a phase gate checklist strategy when developing new products.

As the competitive benchmarks evolve, and the customer needs and expectations change, we’ll update our processes, definitions, and standard work to incorporate the new information.

PN: What are some pointers for companies thinking about integrating sustainability into their design process?

SB: First, companies need to think about sustainability across the products entire lifecycle not just the customer use phase. Design considerations need to include everything from transportation, raw material supply, to any end-of-life or takeback programs.

Secondly, designing sustainability is an activity that requires enterprise input, and it’s not just the responsibility of product managers and product engineers. Companies will need to get buy-in from supply chain colleagues, sales force, as well as marketing communications in order to have a truly integrated program. Companies must have a vertical and horizontal approach within their organization.

Finally, companies may need to provide additional training and resources for engineers that may not have expertise in this area.

PN: How does this go beyond compliance and become a competitive advantage?

SB: More than ever, our customers are looking for us to supply them with sustainable solutions so they can meet their toughest environmental challenges. As an example, we have developed a two-tier lifecycle assessment strategy that allows us to look at our product development process, eliminate waste, capture the entire carbon footprint of the product, and make this information available to our customers.

Ingersoll Rand has a 140 year legacy of being there to help our customers meet the most demanding challenges of the day. This has included developing mining solutions during the Industrial Revolution, construction solutions for building bridges and roads, and today it includes offering products and solutions to help our customers meet their environmental challenges.

Viewing our activities and product development the lens of sustainability helps us reduce our carbon footprint and operational cost, but places us at the leading edge when customers are seeking solutions to help mitigate energy costs, constrain national resources, and environmental rules legislations.

_{Manufacturing photo via Shutterstock.}

During this one hour webinar Re-nourish co-founder Yvette Perullo will present how practicing communication designers can make positive, greener and pragmatic design decisions and how your communication design practice can apply to the Re-nourish Sustainable Standards for inclusion in their directory. She will share with you the tools she has developed at Re-nourish that will empower you to implement sustainable design into your everyday practice. Special guest Gage Mitchell, Creative Director of the sustainable design studio Modern Species will also be joining the discussion. Finally, there will be an open Q&A during which you will be invited to ask questions of Yvette and Gage.

Yvette is currently researching and teaching foundation design courses at Purdue University. She is working towards her ultimate goal of teaching sustainable design at the college level—helping to integrate sustainable systems thinking into the foundation of visual communication design education. Prior to attending Purdue University, Yvette worked as the Art Director for Sage Systems in Boston, MA for the last seven years. She earned a master’s degree in Graphic Design from the New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University in Boston where her graduate thesis focused on developing tools and resources to encourage sustainable design practices.

…

To learn more and to register CLICK HERE.

It’s awesome to think we can recycle plastic bottles into polyester thread that can be used to make clothes. But when you actually see this process in action, you have to wonder—between the shipping and the factory machinery, what’s the carbon balance here? Not to mention the human health cost? We think you’ll be surprised to see what goes into the process:

It also makes you realize that if we could do the impossible and get people to pre-separate their recycleables, we could probably save a lot of trouble down the line. For example, if all drinks bottles were separated from their caps, and further separated by color. But that would be a massive design problem requiring multiple containers in each household, and a level of vigilance I just don’t think our society is ready to undertake.

You do all the right things: establish goals and targets, publish an annual sustainability report, seek employee and public input — and then repeat the cycle. Yet despite your efforts, those around you don’t seem to be moving fast enough to address the world’s environmental challenges, and you sense that real progress will require more involvement on the part of consumers, investors and government leaders.

What do you do? How will you make your company’s engagement efforts more effective, more efficient and more innovative? How can you help to mobilize the masses?

As a manager at SustainAbility and an expert in communications and strategy, I would argue that video can help engage employees and the public in your sustainability efforts and inject new life into the corporate accountability agenda.

Creating shared experiences

I recently interviewed Jim MacNeill as part of The Regeneration Project, a sustainable development initiative. MacNeill, who was lead author of the 1987 Brundtland Report, explained how a series of public hearings helped members of the Brundtland Commission reach a consensus despite their unique backgrounds and conflicting political beliefs. MacNeill said the hearings gave the commissioners a shared body of experiences that helped foster a sense of connection.

Nowadays, video can serve as an effective bonding tool. Many companies gather feedback using traditional methods such as online comment forms, emails or surveys. While these tactics do provide companies with a sense of what their employees and community want, they fail to create shared experiences between businesses and their stakeholders that can truly advance the sustainability agenda.

This is where video comes in. Through the power of film, shift workers could, for instance, bring executives onto factory floors or citizens could demonstrate how company operations affect their local communities. I believe this new perspective would enrich engagement efforts unlike anything we’ve seen to date.

Making ideas more accessible

Video can also ensure a company’s sustainability agenda reaches a wider audience . While watching a TED Talk by Paul Gilding, a sustainability activist, it occurred to me that video — and the Internet — has made Gilding’s ideas accessible to hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise would not have seen him speak.

Imagine if companies used this approach to make their conversations with employees, clients and investors more accessible to others? What if the perspectives shared during stakeholder meetings and roundtables were recorded and posted on the Internet for others to see and respond to? This would give companies the chance to engage with a far wider community than before.

Living in a YouTube era

Bringing stakeholders “virtually” into your boardroom or sharing candid dialogues may feel uncomfortable at first. But bear in mind that changes in the way people consume media are happening all around us, whether we are ready for it or not.

Put simply, we live in a YouTube era where online video has the power to create pop culture icons overnight, or draw widespread attention to corrupt corporate practices (see Greenpeace’s VW Dark Side and Nestle Kit Kat killer campaigns as examples). Given that video now plays an indelible part in the way people interact and gain information in everyday life, companies would be wise to embrace this new platform.

A handful of major companies like Ford, Intel and Starbucks have cottoned on to the power of video and now maintain thriving YouTube channels. And, slowly, we are starting to see companies use video expressly for the purposes of sustainability and corporate accountability. Virgin Media’s 2011 digital sustainability report, for example, featured light-hearted video clips of its staff and other stakeholders, while Royal Bank of Canada developed a series of short films as part of its Blue Water Project, a multiyear program to help foster water stewardship. Finally, Interface is working on I am Mission Zero, a project which — through a collection of video interviews with the company’s factory workers — is striving to reinforce and spread Interface’s culture of sustainability.

Still, video remains a largely underused tool. My sense is that many companies are still figuring out how to answer a few critical questions: What is appropriate — and for that matter, legal — to film? How do we maintain credibility and authenticity? How do we tolerate criticism from stakeholders whose views are different?  How do we justify the time, effort and cost required? And most importantly, how do we produce video that is interesting enough for people to seek out and share?

As major companies find the answers to these questions, other businesses are sure to follow. Will yours?

[Editor's note: We often read about consumers pressuring companies to be more sustainable. But lately we've been hearing examples of the opposite: companies pushing consumers to make greener choices (see Why Walmart wants more consumer pressure for sustainability and Can consumers drive corporate sustainability?) The latest example comes from the fashion industry. Can companies get consumers to actually buy the green products they say they want?]

Leaders in the apparel industry have made important moves to make their operations and designs more environmentally responsible:

• Major fashion houses and labels like Gucci, YSL and Puma have pledged to publicly post environmental profit and loss reports.

• Nike’s adopted waterless dyeing techniques.

• Levi’s devised greener ways to make and care for jeans.

• Timberland and The North Face are trying to make their materials and manufacturing less of a strain on the planet.

• Marks & Spencer came up with the world’s first carbon-neutral brassiere (which spawned a line of sustainable undies).

• Patagonia one-upped the industry by making consumers think twice about buying another article of clothing.

• And posses made up of outdoor wear manufacturers, big-name clothing labels and retailers are developing industry standards with their Eco Index Apparel Tool and Sustainable Apparel Index.

But all that’s for naught if consumers won’t buy into the idea of greening their tastes in clothing and purchasing habits.

The Danish Fashion Institute and BSR are trying to shift the market to more sustainably-minded practices through their NICE Consumer project. (NICE stands for Nordic Initiative Clean and Ethical.) In effect, the initiative seeks to pull together concepts from apparel designers and makers for greening the lifecycle of clothing as well as best practices by retailers to create a framework for sustainable fashion consumption.

Specifically, the initiative aims to “help consumers make more sustainable choices in the purchase, use, care for and disposal of fashion items,” BSR and the Danish Fashion Institute say.

The project partners, who recently announced their campaign, want their work to serve as an example for the European Union. To that end, BSR and the fashion institute have held free webinars for the industry, released a report called “The NICE Consumer” (PDF), and will present recommendations to the EU Presidency on May 3 at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, which is the largest international event for sustainable fashion.

The NICE Project partners have their work cut out for them given that the prevailing sentiment among fashion consumers — be they fashionistas or bargainistas — isn’t less is more. It’s more is more, and the newer, trendier and snazzier the better. For the most part, the apparel, footwear and outdoor gear industries have built their businesses on — and abetted — that unceasing demand.

The groups behind the NICE Consumer project, who point to successful ventures like carsharing, say that the public is ready to think differently about what they buy, when and how they use it.

Photo of shopper dragging bags by Pincasso via Shutterstock.com