Saw this over at Inhabitat:

If you live in a city where plastic takeout containers are not recyclable, you may be feeling the same frustrations that we are. Those of us who can’t bear the thought of simply tossing the receptacles that hold our beloved chinese food, sushi, and wraps try to reuse them as many times as possible. But what could make people who don’t really care about the environment want to hold on to their food containers instead of trashing them? That is the question that designer Takeshi Miyakawa set out to answer. His solution? Shaping the containers to look like a childhood favorite that most adults find difficult to resist–legos!

This does not strike me as a positive development. Unless it uses a more benign material that can biodegrade (recycling/downcycling is better than nothing, but not by an awful lot), gimmicky design like this merely delays the inevitable. Instead of storing their garbage in a landfill, consumers will merely store it temporarily in their homes before they bore of it. I doubt even the designer holds any illusions that these won’t be the first thing to go when the users need to make some room in their apartments, move out, or simply tire of having a space filled with uncomfortable, ill-constructed, barely-usable furnishings. Yes, they may linger in the household for a little bit longer than otherwise, but we’re talking about at most a few years in the lifespan of a plastic container that will live on in the environment for hundreds. On top of that, the containers remain a useless oddity until you acquire a sufficiently large critical mass of them to actually do something with them (which will take either a very long time, or simply drive greater consumption of take-out…)

It seems to me that a great deal of new industrial design objets d’art have are earning their “green” credentials by feeding upon the trend of largely superficial reuse-o-philia. While there is always some limited potential to repurpose old waste and turn it into something new and valuable, more often than not the ‘waste’ was never really garbage to begin with. I’m reminded of a translucent lamp design I saw that was made up of hundreds of drinking straws (there have been lots of these - feel free to visualize whatever example comes most recently to mind). I’m sure the straws were all post-consumer, of course. Because the designer must have paid some poor sap to sort through cafeteria garbage cans for hours, and then to clean them all before they were repurposed, right? Making it so expensive that it will remain an object of transient amusement for some yuppie with eco guilt?

Making new, attractive things - and taking advantage of industrial processes that can make said things accessible to the masses rather than just the elite - is not inherently bad. It’s only bad so long as we work in open loops, and the energy and material put into that object cannot be reclaimed in some way or another (either by nature, in the form of biodegradation, or by us through reuse or recycling). While good design blends art and technology, I fear that the eco movement’s schizophrenic consumption has skewed the direction of contemporary design too far to the former. Maybe it takes more effort to think about efficient materials, processes, and technology than it is to handcraft an art-project bauble out of old junk and sell it to the rich. Given that the result will evidently be lapped up by an uncritical design press eager for new sustainafashions, I’m inclined to think so.

(As an afterword to this somewhat unintentionally raging post, my hope is that the large companies that actually have the power to influence consumption patterns in some meaningful way will take the high road and look towards macro-level solutions and innovative materials to close the loop. I suspect the ‘high’ design magazines, blogs, shows and fairs will continue to mostly fill their pages and halls with irrelevant frippery, but I suppose that’s always been the case.)