Imagine the islands of garbage floating in the seas, the plastic bags filling the landfills.  Shahar Livne, named Emerging Designer of the Year at the Deezeen Virtual Design Festival in May 2020, imagined all that plastic as a future material resource.  Then she created the imagined new material. She calls it lithoplast. She follows in the footsteps of these 10 sustainable designers from Israel we featured all the way back in 2008.

Livne’s 2017 graduate project at the Design Academy Eindhoven was creating from plastic a sustainable material that can be adapted to multiple applications.  This is not recycling, she emphasizes, but re-forming the texture and shape of plastic itself. Upcycling? 

Livne used two industrial by-products, minestone and marble dust, in combination with plastic she garnered from beaches in Israel and Holland. Imitating the geological process called metamorphism, she applied pressure and heat to the layered materials. The result is a pliable material she calls  Lithoplast.

“I call it Lithoplast from the Greek words for rock and moldable,” Livne said in an interview as part of the Dezeen Virtual Design Festival. 

Livne quotes geologists she’s spoken to, who expect that if plastic continues to accumulate on the earth’s surface, it will hybridize with nature and start occurring naturally.  In the future, she envisions, people will mine old plastic deposits as we mine for minerals today, in order to make materials from them.

Repurposing animal byproducts too

Now imagine, if you will, the garbage of slaughterhouses – blood, bones, fat. Livne takes this animal waste and re-creates it as  a new kind of leather, as yarn, and as pigments for dyes. She calls it the Meat Factory Project.

Vegetarian herself, Livne takes a carefully neutral stance towards the relative good or evil of eating meat, hoping that her works raise questions in people’s minds which they will seek to answer themselves.

Her philosophy includes respecting animals in using every part of them.  However, she confesses to a personal moral conflict in using slaughterhouse waste.

“Research was very hard, hauling buckets full of fresh blood still warm from the slaughter,” she says. “But as long as waste is here, it needs to be dealt with.”

She acknowledges that slaughter isn’t going to go away and adds, “This is something that happens anyway. Most of those materials get incinerated or reach waterways. For me, it’s a way to avoid further pollution. I don’t want to encourage them to kill more animals, but we have those resources, and I think they should be used. ” 

Slaughterhouse waste leather

As part of the Meat Factory project, and in collaboration with sustainable luxury footwear brand Nat-2,  Livne has designed sneakers with inserts resembling leather which is made of slaughterhouse waste. She calls it bioleather. The sneakers are made from rubber and cork, with the dark-red bioleather insert.

The formula for bioleather is secret, but Livne goes so far as to say she hopes to make the material waterproof in the future, and that Nat-2 will be able to make an entire shoe from it. She has also produced pigments in shades of orange and red from blood.  

Bioleather can also be spun into yarn. Now imagine a sweater woven out of slaughterhouse waste. Does it creep you out? But such products are meant to raise consciousness.  

“The Meat Factory project investigates the dissonance people have with the food on their plates and the living animal, and the psychological dissonance between raw materials and processed materials,” Livne says.

“It explores the emotional connection with nature that has changed since food and materials became industrialised, and consumers have been alienated from the source, content and use of animal-based materials,” she adds.

One of our long-time readers Pablo Solomon, an environmental artist, comments:

“While Shahar Livne is beautiful, creative and intelligent, I must just say that I have trouble when well meaning people want to go to these incredibly complicated methods to replace tried and true, environmentally friendly, sustainable products like—leather. Almost all meat scraps from slaughterhouses go into pet food.”

::Shahar Livne website

More sustainable design from Israel:

Junktion Upcycles Waste to Whimsey

Israel and Milan Design Week

Merav Feiglin’s recycled lights out of trash

Beauty Increases Sustainability, According to Designer Gadi Amit

Ten Sustainable Israeli Designers Who Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

The post Plastics and leather from wasted meat appeared first on Green Prophet.

10,000 years after inventing agriculture, will we 7 billion take this strange next step?

A Netherlands-based company called PlantLab has devised a method for growing plants indoors using an unearthly pink-purple light made by a combination of red and blue LED lights, instead of sunlight.

Significantly, for a sustainable future anywhere on a planet with 7 billion already – and 9 billion by century’s end – this means we could grow crops with 90 percent less water. Agriculture uses most of the water around the world.

Nowhere is this need for managing on less water more crucial than in the countries of the Middle East and Africa – from Saudi Arabia and Israel, to Yemen and the Sudan – that face the threat of real water scarcity already.

Using lights to grow hydroponically

PlantLab has invented a way to grow plants under LED lights indoors, with all the water recycled within the indoor environment for reuse. Plants, it turns out, are not that dependent on using the sun for photosynthesis. And they certainly don’t mind being separated from their pests. And they are fine with 90 percent less water, if they get it over and over again.

Importantly, in an age of peak oil, PlantLab has also found a way to grow crops that eliminates the two ways that food is dependent on oil.

They have engineered the crops to be able to be grown using fewer fertilizers – which are made from oil.

(Related: 7 Agricultural Solutions That Will Save the Middle East)

The second huge use of oil is in transporting food. But because this indoor habitat can be replicated anywhere in the world, regardless of climate or season – food would no longer rack up unsustainable carbon miles on the way to your table.

The benefits of urban agriculture

Because these eerie new farms can be many stories high, crops can be grown within cities, leaving the most possible land to work naturally as nature’s utility, cleaning the air we breathe and the water we drink, instead of being used for agribusiness that pollutes our rivers with fertilizer runoff from agribusiness.

And, being indoors, away from their pests, there is no need for pesticides. You can imagine how that might ultimately begin to affect their evolution, if we change farming so much that we have have generations of plants grown separated from their natural pests in the open. We live in interesting times.

But PlantLab believes we must rethink food production to survive.

“In order to keep a planet that’s worth living on, we have to change our methods,” says PlantLab’s Gertjan Meeuws in an interview with the Associated Press.

“The methods PlantLab is suggesting are revolutionary. The company grows plants indoors, vertically stacking acres upon acres of plants. They use LED lamps to grow the plants and water them with a slow trickle that drains through the soil and is collected and reused. The neon pink light of the lamps make the space look more like a nightclub than an indoor farm.

Computers capture over 160,000 reports per second to determine the exact amount, cycle, and color spectrum of light that’s optimal for the plant, as well as water, so that no resource is wasted and the plant is neither undernourished nor overexposed.

How do LED grow lights work?

Plants convert light from the sun into energy through the process of photosynthesis, but plants only need some parts of the sun’s color spectrum. Blue and red LEDs can provide just the light a plant needs, making the process more efficient and growing a stronger, healthier plant.

LEDs and climate-controlled indoor farms not only use less energy, less water, and less space than traditional agriculture; they also reduce the unpredictability of our food supply. Indoor farms aren’t at the mercy of droughts, torrential rains, unexpected frosts, and pests. They reduce the danger of food shortages and waste.

Apples from Chile, asparagus from Peru—an average of six to 12 percent of every dollar we spend on food goes to transportation costs.

Traditionally, most agriculture has been limited to large swaths of land with rich soil, controllable pests, and a predictable climate, but even under optimum conditions traditional methods of agriculture drain our water supply, require intensive resources, and produce a crop dependent on an undependable climate.

Until now, vertical greenhouses like AeroFarms Vertical Farming have seemed a little impractical, because our one and only real sun really needs to reach deep into each floor to ripen food crops, but this unearthly pink agriculture would solve that.

But are we ready for such a drastic step?

Related: 

Epic Sahara Forest Project Unveils Pilot Plant in Qatar
Water & The Middle East At A Glance (Infographic)
End Hunger: Food And Vertical Farming In The Middle East

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