Richard Liddle's War on Waste

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That the furniture giant has achieved that degree of recyclability is itself a feat of sustainable engineering, and all the more impressive given the number of parts and the materials involved. Greening such a complex product isn't easy.

By contrast, Liddle's approach is impressive for its simplicity, which makes it extremely energy-efficient. The designer estimates that producing one RD4 chair using his process rather than virgin plastic saves enough energy to run a 60-watt light bulb for more than 1,400 hours. And, of course, in making "waste" plastics useful again, it is reclaiming lost energy in addition to saving valuable virgin materials.

Cohda will introduce several more products based on the URE process over the next six or seven months, including the Blood chair and GEO chandeliers. In addition, a patented interactive LED lighting system called Crypsis is in development, and its first products will be introduced this summer. Though not produced using URE (Liddle won't specify the technologies and manufacturing process involved), it is designed for easy disassembly and uses minimal materials, all of which can be recycled.

Home-Based Fabrication

Cohda also works with clients. It produces a series of bicycle accessories for Toucan Engineering and limited-edition products for Fresh Fat—British designer Tom Dixon's collection of plastic housewares and furniture. Liddle hopes to collaborate with other companies in the future, and is especially interested in the possibilities of rapid-prototyping technologies. Often described as 3D printers, rapid prototyping machines produce physical objects based on digital designs in anywhere from 3 to 72 hours, depending on the machine and the size of the model.

Currently, such machines cost tens of thousands of dollars at the low end and are used by companies to produce design models and, more rarely, actual products. Liddle is among those who see the potential for home-based fabrication. "A home contains a certain percentage of plastic goods," he says. "Imagine if you could just use that plastic to create new goods. When you need a new product, you might actually just buy the design and use the material that you already have and form it."

More immediately, though, Liddle is working on a project he calls URE Live—a public recycling and production factory that will be shown this October at the annual Design Event festival, part of a yearlong series of sustainable design events and community projects in northeast England called Design of the Times 07. For the event, the public is invited to bring plastic trash that will be instantly recycled into a series of products.

"A lot of designers are exploring notions of sustainability in product design these days," says John Thackara, a design consultant, author, and organizer of DOTT 07 (and another of this year's Cutting-Edge Designers), "but Recycling Factory…combines technical, environmental, and cultural story lines in a unique way."

Indeed, few, if any, other products today directly tackle the challenges of existing plastic waste and sustainable manufacturing, let alone do it in a way that so elegantly makes the environmental point: There's no such thing as waste.

Click here to view a slide show of Richard Liddle's designs.

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design on BusinessWeek.com.