The most highly desired tone-woods are not only resonant and produce a good sound, but are also visually beautiful. (Pictured Maple Guitar from UnleavenedShred.)
Some of the most dramatic figure wood is found in North American Maple that can also be sustainably produced.
The wood has also gained a reputation in the Pacific Northwest as “Meth Maple,” since drug addicts will cut trees from protected forests and sell them on the black market for a quick source of cash.
Here’s the first case where DNA fingerprinting of trees was used to match illegal logging activity, which led to the prosecution of the perpetrators under the US Lacey Act.
From FT Weekend for The Art of Travel September/October 2020
Thousands of tonnes of marine pollution is retrieved, repurposed and returned to our homes
Louis Wustemann in FT Weekend JULY 17 2020
Marine plastic: there are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it, swirling in gyres in the great oceans, washing up on beaches, sticking in the throats of sea animals. And, figuratively, in our own, since people such as David Attenborough drew attention to the scale of the problem.
We pollute the seas with plastic by many routes. The single-use bottles and bags that litter our streets blow into rivers and into the ocean; fibres float off our synthetic clothes every time we wash them; waste is dumped illegally offshore.
In May, researchers from Manchester University reported finding up to 1.9m tiny plastic fragments per square metre on the Mediterranean seabed off Italy.
Now this material can end up back in your home, as designers are turning reclaimed ocean waste into contemporary furniture.
Once plastic waste leaves the land, it is a struggle to recover, let alone recycle, the small scraps of different polymers. “It’s incredibly hard to collect at sea,” says Alexander Groves. He should know: he has made furniture from plastic landed in fishing nets off England’s south coast.
As one half of design duo Studio Swine with Azusa Murakami, Groves became aware of the problem of ocean plastic pollution eight years ago while the pair were students at London’s Royal College of Art.
What started as a degree project morphed into a performance piece, filmed in 2012. The three-minute film shows Murakami and Groves on the deck of a lugger boat from the small fishing fleet at Hastings in East Sussex, picking plastic waste from among the flatfish caught in the boat’s nets, reducing it to a tarry sludge in a portable furnace, casting the legs and seat of a simple three-legged stool, then bolting them together. All while at sea.
Nine years on, the Sea Chair is still in occasional production, says Groves, though now made on land from plastic waste gathered on beaches. “There’s quite a waiting list. I make them between other projects,” he says.
A second project (and film), Gyrecraft, saw Studio Swine use a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to fund berths on the research vessel Sea Dragon and sail from the Azores to the Canary Islands through the “north Atlantic garbage patch” in which millions of plastic fragments circulate in the vortex currents.
This time they formed the plastic they recovered into a sculpture shaped like a whale’s tooth in homage to the scrimshaw — elaborately carved teeth and bones — fashioned by sailors on long whaling expeditions.
Tiny plastic fragments trawled from the sea by Studio Swine
Studio Swine’s scrimshaw sculpture made of ocean waste
Groves recognises that the amount of waste they scooped from the Pacific gyre is tiny, and even the 50 kilos of ocean plastic in the 10 Sea Chair stools made to date make a negligible dent in the thousands of tonnes of waste in the seas.
But the stools mostly go to museums for environmental exhibits and the Sea Chair film has been viewed 2.5m times online. That was the point of the exercise, he says: “We wanted to bring people’s attention to the problem; it’s mass communication rather than mass production.”
Others are looking to larger volume production. Danish furniture manufacturer Mater recently reissued the Ocean garden chair and table by acclaimed mid-century Danish designers Nanna and Joergen Ditzel using recycled plastic from fishing nets.
Ocean is a 1955 design, originally made from plywood and steel. Dennie Ditzel, who manages her mother and father’s design archive, licensed Ocean to Mater in 2018. “They were born for it,” she says of the chair and table’s stripped-back, Bauhaus-influenced designs.
The timber slats that formed the table top, chair back and seat are not only easily reproduced in plastic, but the recycled polymer is also more resilient against the elements outdoors. Apart from the materials, the originals were faithfully reproduced, though 5 per cent larger to accommodate expanded 21st-century waistlines. “Most things from the 1950s you have to remake bigger,” says Ditzel.
Nanna and Jørgen Ditzel with their wooden designs, 1955
Mater Design’s plastic-waste chair based on the Ditzels’ wooden model
Just under a kilo of waste plastic is used in each chair and a little more in the table tops. It comes from used fishing nets and ropes that might otherwise have been dumped at sea, becoming so-called ghost gear.
The nets are recycled by Plastix, a company in North Denmark, which buys the maritime waste and turns it into pellets that can be substituted for virgin plastic in consumer products.
Another Plastix customer making garden furniture is ScanCom International, which uses the pellets for a chair and table set in its Lifestyle Garden range. The DuraOcean chair’s one-piece tub base is moulded in recovered plastic and sits on FSC-certified eucalyptus wood legs. ScanCom says that for each of the chairs sold it will donate $5 to ocean clean-up charities.
The chair featured in an exhibition last year at the Eden Project eco-centre in Cornwall, which demonstrated the scale of the problem by recreating a beach in Cyprus where more than 3,000kg of plastic waste washed ashore in one year.
ScanCom International’s DuraOcean chair, made of ocean-waste pellets
House & Home Unlocked
Plastix’s logic in concentrating on used fishing nets and ropes is that targeting volumes of plastic waste before it reaches the ocean is better than having to fish it back out of the sea when it may already have harmed sea life.
David Stover came to the same conclusion eight years ago when his start-up Bureo was looking for a way to reuse ocean plastics. “Naively, we envisioned this ability to go down and gather trash that was washing up all over the world and melt that into products,” says Stover, who left a financial consulting job at Ernst & Young to co-found the company of which he is CEO.
But as Studio Swine had found, beach plastic is made up of hundreds of different polymers, most of which cannot be combined for reuse. Bureo needed a large stream of a single plastic type.
How can we survive without plastic?
“We stumbled across fishing nets,” he says. Thousands of tonnes of nets end up in the sea, making up as much as 10 per cent of all ocean plastic, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“Some are dumped or cut loose when they have tangled or snagged, or at best they make it to landfill or are dumped on beaches,” he says. Others are clumped together and anchored to the ocean floor as “fish aggregating devices”, artificial islands that attract species such as marlin and tuna.
Most nets are made of the same polymer: nylon, which is easily recyclable and highly durable. Bureo works in Chile, Argentina and Peru, where it has developed relationships with boat owners in more than 50 fisheries, who know that if they pass their old nets on to the company they will be paid per kilo and that Bureo will make a contribution to local education and recycling projects.
“If every fisherman knows there is an incentivised system to place their waste at the end of life, you are certainly going to see a reduction in the amount of material out there,” says Stover.
Having gathered the nets — ranging in weight from a few kilos to three tonnes — Bureo’s centres clean them and shred them, then pass them on to a third-party recycler to turn into nylon pellets, which are then sold to manufacturers.
Over the past seven years, some 400 tonnes of Bureo’s pelleted nets have made it into products including skateboards, sunglasses and caps for the
Patagonia clothing brand.
Most recently, they have been used by office furniture manufacturer Humanscale for the frame of its Smart Ocean Chair (the imaginative design of products made from marine plastic is not mirrored in their names).
Humanscale’s Smart Ocean Chair
The chair has the ergonomic virtues of the best office seating but its slim lines and optional aluminium trim give it a less corporate look than many, making it a strong candidate for the growing numbers of people looking to improve the furniture in their home workspace as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like the Mater and DuraOcean garden sets, the Humanscale chairs are easily taken apart and recycled at the end of their lives.
By their contribution to curbing single-use plastics and to a circular economy, in which one person’s waste is another’s raw material, these products are not going to solve the problem of the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of indestructible marine plastic already circulating in global waters, and the millions more in the sediment below. But they show how we can stop that volume increasing.
“There is a long way to go,” says Groves, “but at least it is on the agenda.”
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The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) defines over-tourism as “the impact of tourism on a destination, or parts thereof, that excessively influences perceived quality of life of citizens and/or quality of visitor experiences in a negative way”.
Over-tourism
Will the global travel industry ever be the same again?
By Ken Hickson
The world is enduring its biggest ever lockdown in history. We’re seeing airlines, airports, hotels, cruise companies and tour businesses – and even destinations, which are over-reliant on tourism for their economy – run out of steam and go broke.
What future is there for anyone involved in what’s described as the world’s biggest industry?
Of course, there will be bailouts. Of course, some operators will survive and many will thrive. But can – or should – the tourist industry return to its “good old days”?
This the biggest wake-up call there could ever be for an industry that puts people in jet aircraft, cruise ships, trains and buses, dropping them off on islands and to quaint villages, at the same time, doing untold long term damage to distant cultures.
I hate to say it, but the old adage “you have to be cruel to be kind” applies here. This coronavirus outbreak is like an any major unexpected action – even “an inconvenient truth” – which seems harsh, but will ultimately be of benefit to the industry and the world.
Change had to come to tourism as it was in the process of ruining the environment and cultures in many places.
Look at Venice, where tourism has driven people out of their own homes to
seek a better life, as the historic place is sinking from the weight of tourism and the onslaught of rising sea levels from climate change.
Look at Vanuatu – as I write this, besieged by Cyclone Harold – as it tries to adapt to the surge of climate change, along with the severe cultural and economic disruptions of tourism – mainly from far too many cruise ships disgorging “big spending” passengers onto its fragile shores.
Look at Antarctica – where hundreds of cruises, large and small, visit annually and “besides visiting scientists and native wildlife”, they see that “Antarctica is uninhabited and undeveloped”. However, according to one observer “visiting Antarctica offers cruisers some incredibly unique opportunities like mingling with penguins, taking a polar plunge into sub-zero waters, tent camping on the ice, and whale- and bird-watching.”
I worry greatly about the damage to the environment from over-tourism, particularly in fragile places like the Antarctic, which I was privileged to visit with a TV crew 37 years ago to report on the work of scientists.
Even then I could see the potential for environment degradation, not from tourists but from the pressure of international expeditions and research, often supported by the military with troops and transport.
The Americans had set up a nuclear power station at McMurdo Sound – the radioactive warning signs said it all – and I had the obligation to “advise” one US helicopter crew member not to throw a cigarette butt onto a pristine dry lake bed.
Look at Bhutan in the Himalayas, which is doing what many other tourist destinations should think seriously about. Limit the onslaught of mass tourism, along with the cultural and economic damage it brings.
The Kingdom of Bhutan, seeking to become a high-value destination, imposes a daily fee of US$250 on tourists, that includes touring and hotel accommodation. At last count, the industry there employs 21,000 people and accounts for 1.8% of GDP.
Is this the way to manage tourism? American tour operator, Gabriel Cubbage, thinks so when we met last year in Singapore. He set up Gray Langur as a specialist tour company to cater for those committed to visit Bhutan, as this is one place that values the environment, its forests and its unique culture more than anything else.
I’m impressed too with the work of Singaporean Junxiu Lu – or simply Jin, as she’s widely known – and Chicken Feet Travels, which concentrates on tailor-made tours to out-of-the-way places in Southeast Asia.
“We have carefully vetted and hand-picked accommodation, guides and trip providers that are affordable, reliable, friendly, fun and adopt sustainable and eco-friendly practices”, she says. If customers want luxury that can be arranged, but “we make sure that it is unique, eco-friendly, sustainable and supports the local community.”
Not sure how the global industry is going to set matters right, but it has been talking for a long while about “responsible tourism”. By definition, it’s tourism that minimises negative social, economic and environmental impacts and generates greater economic benefits for local people.
We’re seen little sign that international airlines, aircraft manufacturers, airport operators and cruise companies have been bearing this in mind over the last twenty-odd years.
I think cruise companies are faced with the biggest problem of all. The number of cases of cruise ship passengers falling sick and dying of coronavirus all over the world has been hogging the headlines.
Not only is the cruise business suffering but so is the reputation of leading operators for the poor ship-board management displayed and even lack of proper health servces on board.
What to do with the massive cruise ships built to accommodate 5000 passengers or more?
If they intend to continue to ply their trade and generate business responsibly, they need to do a few things better.
How about drastically reducing the number of passengers and devoting most of the saved space for other essential purposes?
It’s been apparent during this virus outbreak that many of the vessels were not equipped with sufficient hospital beds, medical and health care services. That must be fixed.
We can also suggest that every cruise operator provides many more cultural/ educational programmes and facilities on board and on shore.
They should also limit the number of passengers going ashore at any one location to minimise local disruption and damage. And cruise destinations should also fix a set charge/tax on the number coming ashore, with the funds to be dedicated to local cultural, artistic or educational causes.
When MICE events get back on track, the whole travel industry – including its government backers – needs to assess the serious global problem of over-tourism and come up with definite changes to make the business more sustainable and responsible.
It won’t happen overnight, but this pandemic – and its economic impact – has shown up the major weaknesses in the travel industry and exposed the real situation: that over-tourism is not good for anyone.
As the global travel industry tries to get back on its feet and win back the confidence of everyone – its customers, its employees, its stakeholders – it would be wise to commit to a new charter: commit overcome the negatives associated with mass tourism and take definite steps to introduce responsible and sustainable practices.
Ken Hickson is a sustainability and communication consultant based in Singapore, where he has been an advisor to Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourism Board, along many other airlines, airports and National Tourist Organisations. Originally a newspaper journalist in New Zealand, he has also worked in radio, television and magazines. Currently, he’s the Managing Editor of two online magazines, ABC Carbon Express and The Art of Travel, which has as its theme TREAD-ability: Travel Responsibly for the Environment, Arts and Dreams. He is also the author of six books, including “Flight 901 to Erebus” – a documentary account of an Antarctic commercial airline disaster – and “Race for Sustainability”, which includes a chapter on sustainable events.
