Design
This biodegradable plastic substitute is made out of fish waste
As the quest to find a viable planet-friendly alternative to plastic continues, a bioplastic made of organic fish waste has landed its UK designer a prestigious international award and a £30,000 prize. Lucy Hughes, a graduate in product design from the University of Sussex, scooped the James Read More...
This brilliant system turns food waste into natural pigments for paints and dyes
Many of the artificial pigments that are used to color clothing or to produce paints can be toxic. That’s why a graduate of the Imperial College London has designed a system called Kaiku that turns plants into powdered paint pigments that can replace artificial pigments. Using vaporization Read More...
Tall wooden buildings are popping up around the world. Here’s why that’s good
The tallest wooden building the world has ever seen just completed construction in Norway, standing at a total height of 85.4 meters. Surely some of you are wondering whether or not that’s a fire hazard, but while it would have been worrisome to build towering structures out of wood in the Read More...
Hedonistic sustainability: this clean energy plant doubles as a ski slope
How do you make a waste-to-energy plant a more appealing proposition to the public? How about putting an artificial ski slope on top of it? In Copenhagen, Denmark, city officials recently opened the “cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world”, capable of converting 440,000 tons of Read More...
Does prison architecture have to be cruel? This prison shows us it doesn’t
How should a prison be designed? Should it purposefully be designed to punish inmates using uninviting materials such as steel and concrete, or should it be a place that invites criminals to rehabilitate themselves? While most prisons around the world are designed in a way that aligns with the Read More...
Mexico’s 3D-printed neighborhood for impoverished families is coming to life
On May 13th of this year, the top story of the Optimist Daily was about a nonprofit called New Story that had plans to build the world’s first 3D-printed neighborhood for poor people in Latin America. Well, we’re excited to tell you that the first homes of this neighborhood have been Read More...
These ingenious shutters keep buildings cool without using energy
Air-conditioning is disastrous for the planet, accounting for 9 percent of all energy consumption in the US on its own. As a means of cutting the fossil fuel emissions that come with the heating and cooling of buildings, an architect has invented a shading system made from a smart material called Read More...
This building produces twice the electricity it uses
There are sustainable buildings, and then there is the Powerhouse Brattørkaia—a new building from Norwegian architecture studio Snøhetta. The building, which is located in Trondheim, Norway, produces more than twice the electricity it requires each day. That makes it the world’s northernmost Read More...
The beautiful design of vertical forests is spreading to cities across the globe
The forest and the city may seem like opposites, but what if our architecture could meld our cities with our natural spaces? This is what architect Stefano Boeri’s vertical forest attempts to do. His prototype in Milan features two residential buildings with 20,000 trees, shrubs and plants. Read More...
A community-designed solution: restorative justice arrives in Oakland
The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest per capita rate of incarceration. The punitive justice that lands people behind bars often hits communities of color and poverty much harder than other groups. In Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in Read More...