2010 will be remembered as the decade in which sustainability became the basis of the way we design our environments. My contribution throughout this decade will be to create spaces that are respectful of my client’s individual needs, without forgetting their effect on the environment and on future generations.

What is Sustainable Design?

According to The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), sustainable design “goes beyond being just efficient, attractive, on time and on budget. It is a design that cares about how such goals are achieved, about its effect on people and on the environment.” This decade, we have the power to transform the way we design the environments that inevitably surround us all, and doing so by thinking of the long term gains. As Daniel Gilbert points out in his book Stumbling upon Happiness, something that distinguishes us from animals is our ability to think about the future. This is important because thinking about the future is the foundation of sustainable design.

Evolution of Sustainable Design

I am hopeful for the future of sustainable design because I have already seen positive changes in our time. During the Industrial Revolution the world was concerned with an increase in the production of goods. Materials such as iron and steel were particularly relevant to architecture and design where society sought to erect buildings with the lowest cost to create the biggest space. It was crude calculation with little regard for the internal environment and the people working within them.

Today the effects of global warming, the damaging effects to the ozone layer, and an increase in the greenhouse effect, has ensued a shift in the social consciousness. Designers are increasingly interested in the sources of the materials they incorporate into their space and their longevity, where quality precedes quantity. In the same way interior designers now look after the well being of their clients. When they think of an office they think of it as their clients secondary home and have important design considerations such as indoor pollutants, ergonomics, employee satisfaction, stress, and sick building syndrome.

Sustainable Design and Economics

Looking in to the economics of sustainable design we can observe those European countries which design with a high initial monetary cost but with long-term environmental benefits. With a new administration in the White House these principals are finally being promoted in the United States with the objective of minimizing the countries dependence on foreign oil by investing on alternative energy and technology. Technologies implemented by architects and designers like solar panels, or efficient HVAC systems, window insulation, and light sensors can actually save money in the long run. These can be incorporated into buildings and make its use of energy more efficient.

Sustainable Design and Social Responsibility

As designers we are naturally passionate about human interaction within their environments, I feel this decade we will demonstrate our passion through social responsibility by minimizing our effect on the environment. Until this point designers and architects alike have come up with cutting edge projects and technology which embrace the principals of sustainability while reinventing how we experience our environments. For instance, California’s Academy of Sciences designed by Renzo Piano, or the San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Thom Mayne. In the same way interior designers have raised the bar by taking into account human factors of psychology and following LEED requirements. Our designs are mainly digital eliminating the excessive use of paper, our demands and those of our clients have forced manufacturers to think of the entire life cycle of their products. For instance carpet companies such as Miliken Flooring Company express their environmental commitment through their “No Carpet to Landfill” and “Earth Square” which focuses on recycling used carpets by evaluating all carpets that have reached the end of their life and assess the highest environmental value recovery possible. This is just one example of the several companies that are out there.

My Initiatives as a Designer

My background in International Development – and having have lived in the poorest country in South America – urges me to give back to the community and to our environment in some way or another. I believe that this is the decade of design because history proves that we are more conscientious about the world we live in. We have invented ways of being more efficient and sustainable in our designs, while also being cost effective in the longer term. Sustainability has finally gained traction in the design community. The spaces that facilitate human interaction with each other and the environment are imperative in creating a dialogue among citizens, policymakers, and interior designers. Together these groups are beginning to understand that when the elements of responsible design are incorporated into a modern design project, everybody wins.

See below for more pics from their portfolio and enjoy the fact that green design is now within reach!

A Lot-Ek Solution

By PILAR VILADAS
Published: June 8, 2008

When you meet Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, the partners in the New York architecture firm LOT-EK (pronounced low-tech), the first thing you notice about them – apart from their Italian good looks – is their enthusiasm, a trait that many of their peers in the profession conceal beneath a facade of chilly reserve. But Tolla and Lignano, who came to this country in the early 1990s after completing architecture school in Naples, can’t help themselves. There’s just too much great stuff out there waiting to be turned into architecture: shipping containers, scaffolding, truck backs, ductwork, plastic mesh. Huh?

In fact, LOT-EK – which was a finalist in this year’s National Design Awards – has been making architecture out of industrialized society’s detritus for more than 15 years, turning the drum of a cement mixer into a media lounge, or the tank of an oil truck into the bedrooms and bathrooms of a loft apartment, or recycled shipping containers into mobile clothing stores, offices and apartments. Unlike architects who envision a perfect world of jewel-like buildings in meticulously planned settings, Tolla and Lignano love the messy layering of ad hoc, incremental urban growth; they’ve described their aesthetic as being more “Blade Runner” than “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Olympia Kazi, the director of the Institute for Urban Design, a New York nonprofit, says of LOT-EK, “The way they deal with urban reality is just to accept it.”

Since founding their firm in 1993, the architects have acquired a kind of alternative renown as a little firm that does small, arty projects. Indeed, their biggest U.S. commission to date is a 3,000-square-foot house for Lawrence Weiner, the artist, and his wife, Alice Zimmerman, which is nearing completion in Greenwich Village. But the fact that LOT-EK doesn’t do slick doesn’t mean they can’t do big. Mark Robbins, the dean of the school of architecture at Syracuse University, argued that “it would be a disservice to trade only on the novelty” of LOT-EK’s work. “They are very much architects,” something Robbins said will serve them well as they get bigger commissions. In fact, they recently had a chance to prove this in an extremely competitive arena: Beijing.

The Chinese capital is filled with mind-boggling projects, by superstar architects, that are going up at breakneck speed: Herzog and de Meuron’s “bird’s nest” Olympic stadium; Rem Koolhaas’s enormous, cantilevered CCTV towers; Steven Holl’s two million-square-foot-plus Linked Hybrid development; Norman Foster’s Terminal 3 at the Beijing airport, which will be the biggest building in the world. This would not normally be the kind of playing field on which you’d expect to find a firm of LOT-EK’s size and style. But then, more than one architect has called China the Wild West of architecture today, and in the Wild West, pretty much everybody had a shot. Indeed, while the big boys were designing their supersleek megabuildings, it was Tolla and Lignano’s container fetish that got them not one job but two.

Tolla and Lignano were contacted by the well-regarded Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who was commissioned by a Chinese development company, Guo Feng, to design the master plan and some of the buildings for a mixed-use development called Sanlitun North, not far from Beijing’s version of Embassy Row. Kuma admired the store that LOT-EK designed, featuring recycled shipping containers, for Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing manufacturer, and invited Tolla and Lignano to try something similar in Beijing for a 97,000-square-foot retail and office building. Ultimately, the developers decided that containers weren’t the right look for the upscale Sanlitun North, but the building does have elegant metal-framed windows that angle out from the building’s facade like ductwork, a prized element of LOT-EK’s vocabulary. And the developers liked the container idea enough to bring Kuma and LOT-EK in on Sanlitun South, a retail project they were planning nearby. (SHoP, another young, edgy New York firm, also designed buildings for both projects.)

In contrast to the North project, Sanlitun South was aimed at a younger market – which, presumably, would be much more receptive to LOT-EK’s industrial-funk aesthetic. LOT-EK’s design for the four-story, 250,000-square-foot Sanlitun South, which uses 151 shipping containers, orange-painted stainless-steel mesh and steel scaffolding, was based on the layout of the traditional Chinese hutong, the densely packed neighborhoods punctuated by alleys and small courtyards. The result looks like a kind of retail beehive. “It’s a huge-scale jump for us,” Tolla said. “We could never build like this in Europe or America.”

The notion of a frontier waiting to be explored is central to LOT-EK’s vision, and in all cases, that frontier is an urban one. Tolla and Lignano, who are in their mid-40s, grew up in the same Naples neighborhood but did not really know each other until they were university students. After graduation, they spent three months traveling around the United States and were bowled over by what they saw – especially in contrast to Europe’s “untouchable history,” as Tolla put it.

And as if America’s size and relative newness weren’t enough, the two were particularly awed by its industrial landscape, which would ultimately shape their design vocabulary. “We were like two kids in a candy store,” Lignano said. They longed to return to New York. “It had the same chaotic energy as Naples,” Lignano explained. So in 1990, the pair (who are not a couple) got a postgraduate fellowship at Columbia and found an apartment in the city. They waited on tables at night, did their work by day, began a never-ending love affair with hardware stores and started “making things out of what’s out there.” They also began recording in notes and photographs the chaotic, random and banal elements of the man-made landscape. This giant database became what the architects call the Urban Scan, which is their bible and which is also the title of the book on their work that was published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Tolla and Lignano embraced the idea of low-tech, of operating on the small scale as well as the large, like a workshop, and thus invented their firm’s quirky name, which is also influenced by Jamaican patois and computer language. (It’s still a puzzle to many; Lignano once got a letter addressed to Mr. Ek.) They didn’t want to shun technology; on the contrary, they use it in many of their projects. But, as Lignano said, their work goes “against the grain of thinking that you have to design every single thing.” They discovered the display windows at Barneys and wrote to Simon Doonan, now the store’s creative director, who came to visit them. “We were like, wow, this really is America!” Tolla said. Doonan put some of LOT-EK’s work in Barneys’ Madison Avenue windows in 1993, and the firm was off and running.

A number of art-world commissions followed, including interiors for the Sara Meltzer Gallery, Henry Urbach Architecture and the Bohen Foundation, a nonprofit organization that shows art it has commissioned. In 2001, Urbach – for whom LOT-EK had designed several innovative art-fair installations, including one called SURF-A-BED, in which 16 television screens were suspended above a bed – commissioned LOT-EK to design “MIXER,” the cement-mixer/media cocoon, for his gallery. Urbach, who is now the curator of the architecture and design department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, admires Tolla and Lignano’s commitment to installation-scale work, their passion and the fact that their found-object fixation is recycling in the most fundamental sense. He loves “their inventive spatial sense – the idea that TV light makes space, for instance,” and the fact that their design is humane without being sentimental. Moreover, Urbach said, “I don’t find a trace of cynicism or nihilism in their work, and those things are not in short supply these days.”

For the Bohen Foundation, which is housed in a former printing plant in the Meatpacking District, LOT-EK turned eight recycled shipping containers into discrete modules that function as offices, meeting rooms or video rooms and which move on tracks set into the concrete floor. Walls interspersed among these modules pivot out to create flexible exhibition spaces. For the Weiner house, a former bakery, Tolla and Lignano gutted the interior, moving the staircase to the back of the building, and inserted metal ductwork vertically through the building to house not just ventilation but storage, bathrooms and an elevator. Truck-container backs, with glass instead of a pull-down door, were inserted into the facade, creating a modern version of bay windows, and the architects added a penthouse and a green roof. The industrial elements are tough yet elegant; there’s no trace of conventional domesticity in the house, save for its open kitchen, which takes up much of the first floor, a decision that in itself is unconventional. The master bathroom has no door – something the owners insisted on.

LOT-EK’s design for the lobby of the CanCo lofts in Jersey City (a former American Can factory) includes stacks of Douglas fir planks that become upholstered benches on the floor and that contain lighting when suspended from the ceiling. A wall of electrical conduit forms the backdrop for rows of video screens. The idea was to create a place where residents would congregate, not simply pass through. Mikhail Kurnev, the president of Coalco New York, the company that developed the project, described LOT-EK as an unorthodox but appropriate choice for a project that was aimed at young professionals. “We wanted to position ourselves as up and coming, not like every other building,” he said. LOT-EK’s design, he continued, “definitely put the project on a different pedestal” and got the firm the commission to design the apartment interiors for the development’s next phase.

Tolla and Lignano’s coming projects include an 11,000-square-foot traveling pavilion for the footwear and clothing manufacturer Puma’s entry in the Volvo Ocean Race. The design has not yet been made public, but it’s safe to say that it’s consistent with the vocabulary of two people whose idea of a good time is to photograph stacks of shipping containers in the New Jersey Meadowlands. “The spontaneous built environment is really our master,” Lignano said. “This stuff makes up a much bigger percentage of the environment than architecture ever will.” He cites highway overpasses and airplane graveyards (two unbuilt LOT-EK proposals involved recycling airplane fuselages as buildings) as examples of “the infrastructure that’s in your face all the time.” And grungy as it is, Tolla added that “it’s about the idea of abundance – like the hardware store, but at a bigger scale. It can be in the desert of Namibia, in Los Angeles, or Tokyo. You can see this layering everywhere, because it’s about the way we really operate as human beings.”

The Showhouse That Sustainability Built
by Barnaby J. Feder

Eric Doub knows the difference between talking about building a green home and living in one: more than 2,600 energy-conscious visitors have traipsed through his model home in the last two and a half years.

Four years ago, Mr. Doub, the owner of Ecofutures Building in Boulder, Colo., was one of a growing number of builders intent on designing environmental sustainability into new homes and retrofitted projects. But clients willing to go all out for energy-efficient design and materials were scarce. And on a personal level, certain restrictions in the north Boulder development in which he and his wife, Catherine Childs, lived with their two young children hampered his ability to practice what he preached.

Then Ms. Childs discovered a large lot nearby where they could build their dream house – a house to prove that comfort, and even touches of luxury like a hot tub, did not have to be sacrificed to do right by the environment.

The $1.38 million project (including the land purchase) became a huge financial gamble. Mr. Doub had to cut loose 10 employees – 40 percent of his work force – and Ecofutures took on debt for the first time. But by late November 2005, the family was able to move into the five-bedroom, two-story model home they named Solar Harvest.

It used available technology and, when possible, salvaged materials. Mr. Doub bought 12 used solar panels to heat water for the heating system; the 6,000-gallon underground hot-water tank came from a dairy farm.

Some of the biggest benefits came from choices that did not cost money per se, like having the front of the house face south to take maximum advantage of the sun. But other choices, like installing superinsulated windows and solar electric roof panels, added 8 percent to the cost, Mr. Doub said.

It did not take long for the gamble to begin paying off. In its first year, Solar Harvest fed enough energy into the local power grid during sunny spells to offset the cost of all the power it used other times. A copy of the $8.45 check that Xcel Energy, the utility, sent to settle 2006 accounts sits framed on the dining room table.

Mr. Doub especially enjoyed the tour he offered to 15 local land-use officials one day in early February 2007, when the temperature outside read just about zero. As usual, the indoor temperatures ranged in the high 60s despite the lack of any heat source other than the water tank and air circulating from the tightly insulated sun porch.

Even better, the home began attracting clients like Ronald M. Abramson, the president and chief executive of NexGen Energy Partners, an investment group focused on renewable energy projects, which Mr. Abramson recently moved from Maryland to Boulder. He worked with Mr. Doub for six months to develop plans for a 7,000-square-foot home for him and his family on a stretch of prairie near Lyons, not far from Boulder.

“We wanted to build the most environmentally responsible home in the country,” Mr. Abramson said.

Mr. Doub’s design for the Abramsons includes a combination of wind and solar power that is expected to generate 80 percent more energy than the house will require when it is finished early next year. And, with strict attention to the materials used and their environmental impact, the Abramsons think they can balance their carbon dioxide emissions and reductions.

Carbon neutral or not, the Abramson home is the first to meet new Boulder County regulations that set a sliding scale of permitted energy use, based on size. At the top of the scale, all new homes of more than 5,000 square feet must be energy neutral, generating as much as they use. County officials credit Solar Harvest with drawing support for the new regulations.

“We needed to be able to see some homes that were close to net-zero energy in Boulder County,” said Will Toor, a county commissioner. “Eric’s was the first, and that helped convince people it was feasible at a modest additional cost.”

Mr. Doub said that the smaller the home, the more challenging it can be to achieve a zero energy design because of the higher ratio of walls to interior space. Thus, Mr. Doub said, his work is in some respects less impressive than the single-story 1,130 square foot zero-energy home Habitat for Humanity built in 2005 in nearby Wheat Ridge with help from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The several new Ecofutures projects begun since Solar Harvest was completed have come in at 7 percent to 9 percent above standard building costs, Mr. Doub said. He said that he continued to tinker with Solar Harvest, which cost $987,000 to build. During the unusually cold winter of 2006-7, the solar heating system proved inadequate, so he installed backup electrical heating. He also installed air-conditioning after finding that the only way to do without it in the summer was to wake people on the south side of the house at 5:30 a.m. to close windows before the sun came up.

Last fall, the family replaced its gas appliances with electric ones, partly to make Solar Harvest more representative of homes in the future. He said he expected natural gas prices to continue to rise, driving consumers to electric appliances.

Ecological Antidote: A biotechnology company considers environmental health and sustainability for its new headquarters
by Penny Bonda

The client and the design team of the new Merck Serono headquarters in Geneva brilliantly accomplished an outcome rarely identified as a guiding design vision, yet one unquestionably important to organizational success: sense of place. The 1,200 workers at the global biotechnology company, created by a merger in 2006, had been scattered over six sites in the Swiss city. Bringing the disparate staff together to a single campus-style location was an obvious project directive; uniting them into a community, however, did not happen automatically or easily. It required strategic space and materials solutions that emphasized community, comfort, and communication.

Awarded the interior project after winning an international competition, Mackay + Partners, a London-based multidisciplinary practice, faced the challenge of ensuring a seamless integration of architecture and interiors in a building already under construction. The primary architect, Chicago’s Murphy/Jahn, designed six linked buildings with a total floor area of 807,000 square feet, connected under the roof by an atrium. M+P designed 430,556 square feet of this vast project, the largest in Geneva in 2006. M+P’s scope included all public spaces and offices, executive suites, conference rooms, meeting rooms, and other support spaces.

The implementation of energy-efficient concepts, including daylighting, natural ventilation, and solar technology, maximizes the use of natural resources and minimizes mechanical equipment needs, resulting in a building that modulates its own climate. The glass-and-steel structure-more glass than steel-is located on the shores of Lake Geneva and uses the lake water as a geothermal source for heating and cooling. “Because Swiss code strictly prohibits mechanical air conditioning,” says M+P senior partner Ken Mackay, “we collaborated closely with the architects to optimize the use of natural resources, such as installing a humidity-producing rain cloud in the atrium.” Other strategies include external stainless-steel blinds and interior fabric shades on the south elevations to control heat gain and glare.

The designers also joined forces with German manufacturer Gebr, Kufferath AG on a supergraphic that dominates the back of the atrium. Made from beeswax embedded with LEDs, the striking media wall is computer controlled to showcase video or still images of Merck Serono product launches, company information, and other messages. “The beeswax is a heat-resistant hard-wearing surface that will last 10 to 15 years,” Mackay says. “It’s a Times Square look, but softer.”

M+P used translucency, visual connection, and color to further soften and bring order to the vast interior spaces. Through a series of bridges designed to form meeting places where the bridges intersect, the designers have cleverly created inviting work areas within a large open building that might otherwise overwhelm its occupants. These popular spots, dubbed speakeasies, are furnished with striking red seating, which plays against the frosted-white glass floors of the bridges; their purpose is to increase communications within the company. The restaurant, cafe, library, and gym have been more successful than anticipated in connecting people who had never worked together before, according to Gavin Harris, an M+P partner and interior designer.

The guiding philosophy in materials selection, as dictated by the client, centered on the use of natural materials and a commitment to bringing in the outdoors. Stone used to landscape the exterior was brought into the atrium; timber used in the restaurant was carried through to the decking outside. According to Harris, recyclability and adaptation for reuse informed the furnishing choices, such as the carpets and demountable office partitions.

As one of the biggest buildings in Geneva, the scale of the Merck Serono headquarters is impressive. It sits beautifully within the landscape and links to the lake, creating a true sense of place where people can connect. It’s not a place where people just come to work and then leave.

Now That’s A Waterfront
by Gwen McAuley

Nestled in Southeast Asia, the islands of Malaysia proudly showcase two of the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Putrajaya is the waterfront 30 kilometres south of the capital, and it’s about to step into the architectural limelight. Studio Nicoletti, based out of Rome, Italy, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based Hijjas Kasturi Associates have been busy designing a series of eight sustainable towers for a new residential waterfront development at Precinct 4, to be completed by 2010.

Putrajaya lies on a stretch of Malaysia between Kuala Lumpur and Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It will eventually be the most accessible city in Malaysia, surrounded by expressways, urban highways and railways. But the city planners aren’t letting their urban future stomp on their greenery. Planned by Hijjas Kasturi Associates, Putrajaya has been tagged “The Garden City” because of its preservation of existing eco features and plan to set aside a third of its area for lush greenery, gardens and parks.

Studio Nicoletti Associati won a competition to design Precinct 4, an area of Putrajaya formed along with the massive artificial lake and several other islands by flooding a palm plantation. Studio Nicoletti used this lakeside playground as inspiration for the buildings, designing the development of eight fleet-like ships to compliment the newly formed landscape.

In a recent article on ArabianBusiness.com (by James Boley, posted on March 19/08) about the development’s sustainability, Manfredi Nicoletti elaborated on his vision: “Designing an iconic residential development for Putrajaya requires a rethink to what makes Putrajaya unique in the context to the world. The building should have a uniqueness that tells of its place of origin, which is culturally modern, Islamic and tropical in nature. This group of houses is on the artificial lake, so we conceived a complex of elements like a fleet, each one inspired by a boat.”

Nicoletti means what he says. Unlike cargo ships, the roof gardens come equipped with pools, water massage tubs, bars, cafes and lounging areas to soak up the Malaysian sun. The recently approved master plan ducks under the area’s height restriction with varying tower heights of 15-18 stories to compliment the horizon. The number of units in each tower ranges from 150 to 350. The towers are arranged in a permeable, radiating block of bioclimatic architecture new to this area of Malaysia.

A light brise-soleil skin connected to the vertical pillars protects each unit and controls the amount of daylight coming in without compromising the expansive lake views. Studio Nicoletti included sustainable strategies like terraces, sunshades, natural ventilation and integrated green space in their design. The towers will use alternative energy and are expected to produce 50% less CO2 emissions than similar residential projects.

Carbon reduction measures include the use of community energy, CHP, a surface water heat pump coupled with the lake and wind turbines and low energy lighting. The interior will be decked out with water-efficient dishwashers and washing machines and the water system will use recycled rainwater. All timber used in construction has been MTCC/FSC certified and locally sourced materials have been given priority in building. The designers incorporated bicycle storage and paths throughout the property, as well as car clubs offering up hybrid vehicles. The towers are designed with waste sorting and recycling systems and biodiversity measures (e.g. roof gardens) in each tower to contribute to sustainability.

Studio Nicoletti included sustainable strategies like terraces, sunshades, natural ventilation and integrated green space in their design. The towers are intended to use alternative energy: the goal is to produce 50% less CO2 emissions than similar residential projects. In an attempt to maintain the Islamic culture of Malaysia, Studio Nicoletti used many Islamic design elements to appeal to Middle Eastern and Asian investors.

Studio Nicoletti’s focus throughout is on the relationship between the buildings and the waterfront. Islamic or not, Studio Nicoletti strongly believes that the waterfront planning should tie the boulevard buildings back to the waterfront. Permeable building blocks and smaller block sizes are intended to enhance the visual corridors and links between the boulevard and the waterfront, leading passersby by to the waterfront, and the transparency of the buildings is designed to further erase the distinction between land and water. In time, we will see what these ships can do.

Green Trail
by Charitha Fernand

Sri Lanka plant blazes green trail for Marks & Spencer

UK retailer, Marks & Spencer says a newly re-built eco-friendly apparel factory in Sri Lanka is part of a plan that will see all operations being ‘greened’ by 2012, in response to growing environmental consciousness in its markets.
M&S, commissioned a completely re-built ‘green’ casual wear manufacturing plant run by Sri Lankan apparel giant Brandix, north of Colombo Friday. The plant employs 1,600 people.

Officials say the green factory has already cut energy costs by 43 percent and water by 60 percent

The retailer says climate change and environmental issues have become more important in the UK following former US vice president, Al Gore’s documentary, “The inconvenient truth.”

“In the space of 12 months or so, it has become a huge political issue in the UK and it has become a huge topic of conversation with the general public,” M&S Paschal Little from M&S lingerie & casual wear division said.

“Our brand within the UK holds a very special position and our customers expect us to take a lead on environmental issues like this.”

“We wanted to work with a key supply partner to establish some model green factories of which the Brandix factory is one.” he said.

Global Benchmark

M&S says Brandix’ ‘green’ factory will be accredited with a leadership in energy and environmental design [LEED] rating by Green Building Council of the US.

This will help set up the plant as a benchmark for eco friendly apparel manufacture in the world.

“As a redesigned factory, it marks a new benchmark for the apparel industry independently accredited by LEED to the highest possible standard,” Little said.

“It will certainly represent a benchmark for other garment makers around the world,” he said.

M&S is also looking at ‘greening’ their stores and achieving carbon neutral status at its 600-strong retail outlets network.

A ‘green’ branding could also qualify Marks & Spencer to price garments manufactured in green factories at a premium.

“We would like to at some stage to identify products within our stores as coming from green factories,” Little said.

“We want to give our customer the choice. We want to communicate to our customers what’s happening in this project,” he said.

The Brandix green factory initiative is part of Marks and Spencer’s ‘Plan A’ initiative which hopes the make the chain carbon neutral and help customers and suppliers reduce their emissions.

Resource Efficient

Under plan, M&S wants its suppliers to top sending waste for landfills, buy more ’sustainable’ raw materials like cotton and set new standards for ‘ethical’ trading by treating trading partners fairly.

Brandix which is hopeful of a LEED top ranked platinum certificate by end June.

This would be the first such certification of an apparel factory.

“We are hopeful by June that we will get the LEED certificate accreditation on a point system on how much of green you have, how much of energy and water you have saved,” Brandix Lanka director A J Johnpillai said.

The 30 year old factory in Seeduwa which cost 270 million rupees to convert to green status has 70,000 square feet of space.

“Seventy percent of all workers will have day light, 91 percent of girls will have views to the greenery outside,” he said.

Brandix says investing in energy reduction makes commercial sense amidst rising energy costs although with a payback time estimated at around three and a half years.

Onyx is a cryptocrystalline form of quartz, it’s layers are formed by nature with varying colors ranging from creamy whites, gold’s and yellow-brownish to, reds, browns, greens, and grays. It is formed in intense heat and pressure, such as those within volcanoes. Although Onyx is heavy like a rock, it is naturally translucent, which is perhaps one of it’s most appealing qualities aside from it’s durability strong enough to fight the elements such as dust sun-light, and water.

A company which sells items made from this material is DECONYX. They are based out of Canada and buy their merchandise from a village in Mexico which specializes in the production of an ample variety of items for home decor.

Their featured category, lighting is stunning, Onyx’s translucent nature make these lamps very appealing. The light projects a calming light that is ideal for a night light or even a floor lamp.

Most of the items at Deconyx are hand carved, with the exception of large scale items, this proves that there is no need for a high energy manufacturing process.

These products are great, and you are sure to find something within your budget. Check out their website at www.deconyx.ca and let me what you think.

it sees you pass by

it sees you live

you don’t even notice

It extends it’s arm

so it can be touched

it grants you a breath

but you still don’t notice

It sees you age

and build things around it

but it remains

stagnant

and you still don’t notice

Until one day

you age you grow

you visit it

you grab it’s arm

and wish you were it

but it’s too late,

you’re old you fade

but it remains stagnant.