Richard Liddle's War on Waste

An innovative champion of sustainable design is turning plastic into the ultimate recyclable material

by Jessie Scanlon

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Newcastle upon Tyne, an industrial city in northeast Britain, isn't the kind of place you'd expect to find a pioneering designer. Yet that is where Richard Liddle set out to solve one of England's ugliest problems: plastic waste, or, as he would call it, "dead energy." Some 243,900 metric tons of HDPE plastic entered the British waste stream in 2001, according to a report by British environmental organization Waste Watch—207,200 of which were recoverable, but not recovered. Most of it simply ended up in landfills.

Meanwhile, a growing interest in sustainability was leading designers to use recycled materials, most of which were imported because Britain still lacks the recycling and processing infrastructure needed to reclaim plastic. In other words, the country was importing material of which it already had an abundant raw supply, and compounding a growing environmental problem in the process.

"When I first started looking into sustainable design as a student, I found recycled wood panels and plastic sheeting, but you're limited in what you can produce from them," says Liddle. "More importantly, they're all imported. Our waste was still being wasted."

Straw Into Gold

How, Liddle wanted to know, could all of that plastic waste be turned into something productive, its energy and value reclaimed? He spent two years at London's Royal College of Art studying the problem and developing a solution—a proprietary process that melds plastic recycling and manufacturing into a single, seamless process. Then he returned to Newcastle—where he'd earned his master's—in part because of the region's manufacturing history. "I could take advantage of the deep knowledge in this area and get access to industry," he says, and indeed, with some effort, he found a company willing to let him use its industrial machines for some early experiments and trials.

And so it is here, in a small studio that looks more like a tiny factory, that Liddle's Cohda Design refined its process of efficiently converting waste materials into new products. The studio is equipped with the modified industrial machines that can take bottles made of HDPE—a plastic used in the construction, housewares, automotive, and packaging industries—grind them into flakes, melt them, and form that molten plastic into chairs, lamps, and other products using a process he calls uncooled recycled extrude, or URE.

Production-ready prototypes, as well as more experimental geometric and woven forms, show the myriad possible designs. In most cases, those could be melted down and fed back through the process again and again—the opposite of what Liddle sees as the built-in obsolescence of most furniture today.

The Beauty of Green

Cohda's first commercial product, the RD4 (or "roughly drawn") chair, was shown at both the retailer Design Within Reach and the pop-up exhibition HauteGreen during New York's International Contemporary Furniture Fair in May (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/23/07, "Tomorrow's Furniture Today").

Formed of woven strips of plastic, the chair is both 100% recycled and 100% recyclable, but it made an impact as much for its looks as for its green quotient. As HauteGreen co-producer Kimberly Oliver says: "The concept of making something new and beautiful from scrap materials is popular in green design, but the transformation of plastic waste into something as iconic and high-end as the RD4 is unique. Cohda takes recycled design into the realm of art."

That thought is echoed by Paul Donald, founder of Branch (branchhome.com), the Web retailer that was the first to carry the chair in the U.S. "The RD4 embodies the very best of both worlds: It's a gorgeous, iconic piece of furniture that happens to be made from waste material," he says.

Saving Energy, Too

To put the RD4's "green-ness" in context, the chair is eco-friendlier than Herman Miller's iconic Aeron, which is composed of 66% recycled materials and is 94% recyclable.