#019 - Beyond Sustainability — The Circular Design Future with Pioneers Chaline Church & Paul Capel

Questions like these will give you a better understanding of sustainable design, along with ideas for practical application, but also the challenges you’ll face. We’ll talk about the role of designers in creating a more resilient future.

1. What are the benefits of sustainable design in architecture and interior design?
2. How can designers integrate sustainability without compromising aesthetics?
3. What are some innovative materials and building techniques you can use?
4. How can designers contribute to the circular economy?
5. What are the challenges and opportunities in implementing renewable design?
6. How can you respond to your clients sustainable ideas?
7. How can interior designers make informed sustainable choices?
8. Case studies of positive environmental and social impact
9. How can businesses find a balance between sustainability and profitability?
10. How can you contribute to a brighter future through conscious design choices?

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https://instituteofinteriorimpact.com/chalene/

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Transcript

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We do tend to think well you know we've now the product is in place and surely the manufacturers and surely the governments and surely all the standards take material Health into consideration so that designers don't need to think about it but unfortunately that's not the case more and more we're finding it out from the health perspective that the standards that are actually in place are actually very low and are really not fit for purpose in many cases.

Yes another podcast episode about sustainability and Beyonce because listen this is what I want you to know and remember we as interior designers and Architects are a very important in creating awareness and sustainability in making it happen because we are de-shackle in the middle of a chain on one end we have our clients the consumers and on the other hand the producers the manufacturers so we can control positive change but then one of the first questions might pop up to you like how do we know what's a good product how do I assess those healthy products and how can I easily Implement that in my own entire design business therefore I divided the founders yes to yes today from five fifth uh sorry 540 worlds UK and 540 World aims to create a circular world of goose both Marvel those are secret little material Specialists and provide gold standards Planet constitutions for our businesses and material innovators they are going to share practical Pathways to regenerative design and the how to transport transform from a linear economy designed to regenerative creative to cradle safe and circular design here they are Celine church and talk about

oh yeah great to be here yeah nice to meet you well to uh to get started what's the very first beginning can you take us to the very first beginning of where the idea is this Mission this hunger to goods for our planet where does it start at Celine

thank you actually can you hear me now yes I can hear you perfect um thanks again for having us both and for me it probably started when I was about 10 years old when I was actually thinking of becoming a marine biologist um at 10 I think everybody wants to save the world I think we have better principles sometimes when we're that young and we actually ended up cleaning Penguins after big oil spill and I was very affected by cleaning oil out of penguin's eyes and nostrils and um seeing the distress of these birds in in Cape Town where I'm originally from that was probably the very first um impact of seeing um basically products in the wrong places so that was probably my first impact and then to kind of long story short I ended up in design product design for years and years and then ended up creating lots of plastic products for the likes of Disney and various other big corporations and I have to say my you know principles weren't part of design and neither were they part of our design um degree or anything like that so I went to full circle and then had a sort of new conscience around about 2015 um meeting Paul in 2019 after doing Masters and architecture and just going we need to create healthy materials healthy spaces healthy products so that's the short version yeah great yeah sounds very logical greater great product from there from from the Penguins and the Really vaccination to uh to what you've built right now we are going to dive into it deeper later on what's your story how did you end up here oh well how did you end up starting here yeah well I get I guess for me you know I I grew up in the countryside my dad was a Forester so you know I was I was always surrounded by nature and I I got kind of um uh scared and kind of into activism quite young um I used to do quite a lot of Greenpeace stuff and um you know it was it was basically kind of like trying to do something about some of these big picture things that we all get a little bit scared about and then in 2006 I read a book and it was called cradle to cradle rethinking the way we make things and changed my life really it sort of took away my scared old eyes that was creating this activism in me this guy like you know this desire to go out and make some good in the world um to actually wow these are there's some solutions out there that can actually uh fix some of this stuff so you know it's uh it's gone kind of Full Circle as as chalino's to say you know it's um 540 world is about changing from this linear destructive sort of pathway that we we seem to have found ourselves on into into a circular safe responsibly made one so that's kind of where we where we came from and where we're where we're heading yeah lovely yeah it's great to see how you become because there's activism there's like

like a really uh well the solution based people they'll think okay we have to do something about it but how can we view it and what can we do Anna that's most yeah mostly the most tricky part or difficult part you have to take action on it we all know that some things are not good for the plant we don't know and what not to do and we wish it would be better but where do you start so what is um what is what is now the goal from uh 540 planet five for the world so for 540 World we've got multiple minor goals but I think the major one is is quite it's quite big picture really and we'd like to just help the built environment particularly because that's where we find our both of us have master's degrees in in architecture so that's a mine's an interior architecture specifically but we do find that that is such a hugely wasteful um and impactful area and it makes sense for us to try and transform the built environment and interior environments to a non-linear design objective space into a healthy material regenerative design space so that's just a big pick to go yeah yeah great you said the the linear economy what do you uh what what do you mean with linear so I think most of your audience are probably fairly familiar with linear design and that usually tends to mean take make waste and what what that means is really taking materials virgin materials out of the ground and out of um plants or wherever it comes from and then making that manufacturing that into a product or material and then there's a lot of waste in that process and there's a lot of waste in the design and the use and often single use and for the most part that is a linear design process so the whole process of finding material putting it in a in a building and then ultimately ripping it out and putting it in a skip ending up in landfill or incineration or polluting the air that's the that's the classic take make waste linear design model yeah so take make and waste yeah so you have what well I can't imagine it's it's most designers Architects they see the garden of the designers their end products right it's like hey I create something I design something I create something and then wow it's finished and well people are living it they're using it but the next step that's mostly not part of our well for sure our business models because it's maybe they want to change something over the years and you have your the same client again or another company you said occupying the building or circumstances so what what is it that's what is them maybe the Mind shift that we need to to have as designers because yeah it's it's definitely not the end product although we see it that way sometimes no it's not the end product Mark and I think it's a it's a great question thanks for asking um Paul will go into that in a little bit more detail in in terms of what we've stumbled across as um some of you know the best framework in the world and what that means in the categories but for me I think the starting point is to reestablish the your key objectives and as a an interior designer you're normally looking at the client's functionality their budget and aesthetic those are usually the key kind of areas that you use for design and um I know you like to say don't leave your interior design audience the same after they've seen a podcast so that's really the challenge point and I I always say look at the context and look at the big picture context so you know we know that our planetary boundaries we've transgressed six of our nine planetary boundaries um in the since May last year so big picture science is telling us that we all need to look at our sphere of influence and our sphere of influence might be with our clients it might be with the specification of procurement team or whatever it is but as designers we have to to realize that we are part we're spoken that big wheel so we really need to start designing uh differently and that's partly what we're talking about today so I think it's looking at the fact that you're you're part of a bigger picture you're not actually just a small spoken or will um you really are important so that's the first thing is re-establishing your objectives so I would like to disrupt those those classic objectives and actually say to everybody you really need to look at your process differently so I I say that in two spaces one is your pre-design yeah sometimes look at ABC you've got your ambition levels and that involves all stakeholders just keep with the A's for now so so um B is your briefs and C is your contracts so in pre-design you can actually challenge your entire stakeholder just your clients and everybody involved to start looking at things more holistically using you know Planet positive materials things like that so if they're in your ambition levels right from the beginning throughout your stakeholder briefs and contracts your ABCs or pre-design it's much less likely for the good products to fall off at the end due to budget or due to any other yeah so so it's it's really it's urgent to start at the very first point it should be one of your design principles almost actually yeah to to get everybody on board and that they know from the very first point they're going to work with you absolutely and then we should go in the right direction all right direction you would like to send absolutely and we're not just saying that in sort of an Ideal World what we're actually saying is that's that's quite evidentially based we're seeing that in the international sectors that are much more mature now doing this very successfully they one of their key lessons that they've taught us out of the big projects they've done is that if you get all the stakeholders on board you are much more likely to succeed with their regenerative or Beyond sustainable design model if you don't are you likely to get it it'll get cropped off either from procurement for you know budget or somewhere along the lines it'll get hacked to Pieces so that's really really a really important pre-design ABC emission levels briefs and context is the starting point and Paul no doubt integrate more of how we would talk about design and how you find those materials and and how you verify that they are the right ones to use yeah because there is as you said there's a lot of green washing involved we have so many so many words and definitions for our for Creative to pray on greenwashing was sustainable durable whatever it's uh most of the time it's a lot of marketing yeah like we said a lot of people it's a wonderful quote of yours like most a lot of people know Master The Art of Storytelling but do they Master the art of doing the right thing and that's well that's might be a big problem right now we are facing every day with all the suppliers and manufacturers right

that's why I actually wrestled Paul to the ground not literally obviously um in 2019 because I I just finished my masters and I'd integrated I'm a partner in a health clinic as well as um design specialist and so I'd literally spent years doing design in commercial sectors and then looking at health and I wanted to design humanly healthy spaces so I spent my masters looking at materials design and how to optimize human health and so when I came out I naively thought oh well I'll just look for you know really healthy materials and and carry on designing as we always get taught to design and that was completely wrong and to find the materials proved incredibly difficult which is how I actually ended up going do I need to now become a chemist and an engineer and a biologist and you know how do I actually find whether this bamboo versus this you know there's a lot of technicalities right absolutely and green washing is very mature and being in marketing for years I understood you know you'd read a paragraph and I thought this is very well written but I have no way of verifying if this is actually true or not and unfortunately people have realized that sustainability and using those kind of terminologies is a marketing Ploy it's a it helps their product sells so they'll use it and have been using it quite willy-nilly up until now um they have they haven't been guide still recently so that's where I sort of got hold of Paul because I knew he was the basically the sort of head honcho in this country and um I said we need to we need to actually help clients find them at materials you have to help me to help designers and Architects they don't have the time or the luxury of you know a couple of years like I did to actually find Cradle to cradle certified is the world global standard for materially healthy circular and socially fair materials and then you've still got to find them so it's a really really difficult a tricky navigation for most people who just want to really just design and they want to use the right things but for them to find them is not is not easy so that's where I I met Paul and I said we need to help people access this and help bring the message forward yeah but because I was I was mentioning Samuel in their first meeting list if we ask our painters for example if we leave it to them like hey I want to can you serve me for a green paint you will he will give you green paint for sure but the color green right he has no clue you can go on the marketing facts of a brand or what this supplier will tell him or but you never yeah you never know if you do the right thing so it has to come from the very first chain like you as a designer telling your client educating your client on what's the best for them probably and for the planet and then all the people and parties that are involved after you uh that you can put them on the same track in the same line yeah so Paul you are more the the scientist more the the proof the yeah you tell me tell me more how does it how does it work because it is Technical and biology how how do you make sure we have uh we are well we can use the right products I think I think that you touched on a really interesting point there this technology and biology thing because when we if you start from that very beginning of trying to create these things in this Cradle to Greater way we clearly Define is this a technical thing or is this a biological thing because if you create um things that need to do a technical function from biological materials sometimes that's not necessarily the best tool so sometimes you you know if you want to have a technical um part of it like a metal or something then you don't want that to biodegrade while it's it's doing it's it's intended uh design so it's really key those kind of some of those fundamental things and you know there's people been working on this idea for for decades now um crowd's Cradle that book I mentioned was written in 2002 so it's like 21 years ago um and since then industry has been trying to evolve trying to uh you know work out how the heck we do this stuff how do we do circular circular when so circular's been around for a while circular economy we start to call it circular design but there's already like sustainability 150 different variations of a definition for it so what CDC clouds cradle does is it's a framework it's scientific it's based on third-party verification so you can trust it and that's the thing it's got so much uh richness to it it that's it's quite tricky to actually explain it in an easy way because you just want a green paint or you just want to yeah something that you're going to use in your design um that's the thing ballet we are we yeah we are creatives and we want to desserts we need to do and all the time we need to spend on finding the perfect products and it's and it's changing very fast that are coming new products every every day maybe uh new products will enter the market and we don't know again if it's a marketing product is it the technical Innovation program to trade a lot of or really good biological biological one and is it how does it function if you put paint on the wall is it has it the same qualities then uh let's call it chemical paint yeah not to mention the health issues we can get from all this uh toxic exactly is it this is why um pretty much I I stick to crowd squirrel certified as a kind of like foundation for the work that I do and the 540 world does because you can guarantee that the products that have got acrylic certification are usually the best quality so you get sustainability you get circlarity but you also get the best quality and this is this is quite a kind of eye-opening uh thing for a lot of people because a lot of people think okay we want to do the best thing we can we want to do the right thing but we have to do a lesser thing yeah we have to do something sustainability is maybe somehow you know it doesn't function the same way that um the the normal one does but actually that isn't true with growth certified you as I say you you look at the products that have gone through this process it's so rigorous that you end up with the best quality and you get all that other stuff you know just almost by default so we love it when we explain this to uh the UK environment agency they were like wow this is amazing this kind of feeds into 11 of the UN sdgs it feeds into all of our sustainability Ambitions social ones carbon ones renew you know all of these things so this is why we take it to heart and uh talk to talk a lot about it yeah

yeah most of us use all day long in every project that's a great place we we found that you know when I started doing the material health research and I actually found out that synthetic paint takes five years to complete its off-gassing and that oh yes five years after its dried uh it's still off-gassing and then I'm thinking of this fresh new baby room where you put your child safely in there no and that that these are quite a challenging points because we do tend to think well you know we've now the product is in place and surely the manufacturers and surely the governments and surely all the standards take material Health into consideration so that designers don't need to think about it but unfortunately that's not the case more and more we're finding out from the health perspective that the standards that are actually in place are actually very low and are really not fit for purpose in many cases so for example if we stick to paint there are just two important points as I said rough gases up to five years after it dries so if you know that that's got cost carcinogens vocs all these other terrible you know parabens Plastics all sorts of other things are inside the paint and you know that it's delivering toxins up to five years and sometimes longer because in some cases the materials actually degrade so actually the material Health gets worse over time so it's not like it goes on the wall and then now it's all stable in some cases it doesn't even do that and for pain for example for synthetic pains it can produce up to 30 liters of sludge per liter of paint that we use so every liter that we put popping on a wall it's equal to 30 liters going into landfall Into Water Systems so those are just two um examples a third one which I'm sorry if anybody's a bit um scared by these things but these are really important facts to know about materials so paint for example in the UK they did a big study a while back 40 percent of decorators which is the terminology they use here for people who paint as a career in occupation 40 of decorators end up getting lung cancer that's nearly one in every two oh now if we know that as designers and I do know I mean the minute I heard these statistics I could never ever specify a non-cradle to cradle paint knowing that I'm allowing toxins into that person who's actually doing that 24 7 for their career and and in office spaces where you're sitting 90 95 of your day into in interior an office space or in your home so it's a no-brainer for me uh you know that's how I learned about grafen Stone pink which is CO2 absorbing it's got no Carson carcinogens so for a long time that was the only paint that I could specify in the UK because it's Cradle to cradle certified at Gold level and at Silver level or for colors it's got every color that you can think of it does all these other amazing things and it's got no Health uh negative areas whatsoever fortunately uh things have moved on and there are a couple of other brands now internationally that also have Cradle to cradle certified but it's really difficult for a designer to become a circular material specialist because they don't I mean I've got 20 years of health and hostages you know you can't do that straight away so like Paul says if you don't have the time which we appreciate people don't just like you go and buy fair trade bananas most people do these days you go and buy a cradle to cradle certified products you literally can sleep at night because you know that you are not uh integrating a terrible chemistry just from the material health and then you've got all the other five categories which I'm you know cause better yeah which ones which ones are they Paul are you into there yeah so there's kind of there's actually there's actually seven really in the new version but there's five criteria so material health so this is uh the chemistry and the biology to the parts for a million tested against I think about 24 end points where it's like does it bioaccumulating fish does it accumulate in our body tissue these kind of like scientific measures of of what the the chemistry in the biology is doing in the system the second one is product circularity so how does this sit in a system so this is we know what the material is we know how it flows through a system it might not be actually circular we call it circular but it's a kind of flow of material yeah but that's the second product say Clarity and that is broken down into multiple strands of like the design the actually how you put it together and this is what's really quite interesting you know you can you can be an interior architect and change the system or your components quite quickly and quite in quite small Cycles if you fix it in the right way so saying you mechanical connections instead of you have to assemble exactly so you the way you assemble it makes it easy if it's easy to assemble it's easier to disassemble therefore it's easier to change so you could have a fresh thing every you know a few years as long as you keep the value of that material yeah there was a one from the other podcast with Ankita she's she's not a sustainable hero and and she was she said um if you can um don't glue it if you can screw it exactly because it has to do I never thought about designing an interior that you know up front that you can take the whole entire design off let's say in half a day because it's easy it's cheaper to uh to change your interior in that way but it's even better for the material that you can reuse it or resell it or whatever or create something else for it but when it's when it's glued even with this toxic glue it's most of the time to disable the world exactly so that that fits into the whole sort of modularity disassembly all that kind of thing so exactly screw down glue Weld and avoid welding rather bolt instead of weld or that kind of there's so many along that that area so like Paul says the the second pillar is circularity and that includes sourcing design and systems and then there are another three really do you want to mention them Paul yeah so so that's really to do with the material and how exists in a system and then it's how do you make the product um so what greenhouse gases are emitted um how does how much renewable energy is involved in the in the production of that thing so this is looks at very you you then can get out these these kind of really quite broad but really important um data points which how much embodied carbon have you got in your product so that's the the third one renewable NG and uh and clean climate then you've got um Soil and Water so when you're producing this thing is how does it interact with the soil and how does it can it return to the soil if it's a biological thing if it's a paint you know eventually that's going to come off the wall end up in the in a water system or in the soil systems is it healthy um so you've got water and soil and then you've got um social fairness so when you when you actually manufacturing this is everybody being paid fairly you know is this there's no slavery in the system there's like very high criteria um so yeah that's the thing that's yeah we you almost forgot you know in this whole all these bullying bites the last one is maybe when you when we are buying uh products that we can eat their food or beverages we are more used to yeah exactly and that kind of thing but not exactly not with designing and using materials right but yeah you get all of that built into the into the criteria and the interesting thing with um crowd spread or certified as a holistic thing is you every two years you have to improve so the the certification is really just a kind of marketing tool of how how well you've done so far and actually you know the The Innovation framework and the ideas behind it are encouraging you to get to this place where you know we're solving some of these problems so nothing's perfect at the moment you know it's like we we're doing the best we can but you know there's an opportunity yeah you could say like this like this energy label hey we started with the E and then you had a

hey where do we end up yeah yeah exactly I think also that um the other thing that just sort of mentioning again the social fairness when I started looking at Social fairness some years back and we um I've got a friend who works in one of the one of the local uh one of the biggest local charities for refugees and she was she was talking to me about how 75 of European products these are products you and I buy most for the most part have for slavery in the system 75 75 so if you look around your home 75 three in every four products in your home have slavery in the system now that's a shocking statistic and this is why Cradle to cradle is is so powerful because they actually put boots on the ground they go and check every single Factory they go and visit them they check that the energy is you know solar or wind or whatever people say that say that it is they actually visit these places there's no way that anybody can say it is something when it isn't so it's fully traceable fully robust fully assessed fully verified and it's third party verified they have firewalls even within their system so they have these incredible Global assessors to check the products then that material is bundled and sent to the Institute the full title for that is the Cradle to cradle products Innovation Institute and our nurse fan we've given you all the links so your audience can link to all of this information later yeah wonderful we are going to prepare a landing base especially for this exactly so it's a it's a wonderful certification and robust science-based evidence-based framework so it's I like to say it's bulletproof that's my phraseology of it but it means that as a designer if you find a cradle to cradle product on any level because they have scoring at bronze silver gold and platinum level you know that that manufacturer is on the way to doing the right thing and they've at least looked at those seven areas like horses sort of their seven criteria but effectively they call it five five categories and most uh most manufacturers are only looking at singular siled categories so they might be looking at carbon for example which is quite a common one now that people are looking at Carbon and that's great that they're looking at Carbon but actually methane gas all the green women's gases air and climate health is just one of the five categories that they robustly look at and we meet we need Garmin in this world otherwise what happens exactly it's it's where that it's where that carbon is within a system is there yeah the issue if it's fugitive in the sky you know it's in the wrong place that's it the soil or in the in the trees or locked into some of these products you've got you've you've got a really good example of that is um this product called the Koya because it's a soft word it grows very quickly so it's a and then it's modified so it lasts as long as a hot as a hardwood so it's it's actually sequesting the carbon so you can actually lock carbon up in your project become carbon positive is the way we like to um describe it because a lot of this like these ideas are actually then this leads into the regenerative bit of it we don't want to go for sustainable sustainability is this kind of zero line of just sustaining yeah what we want to do is regenerate the system yeah clean the water you know add more tops or Topsoils not really talked about it's an asset that we're losing a huge rate yeah yeah Topsoils um healthy soils so looking at it from a system you know and putting carbon back into the right part of that system not being afraid of it it's not the enemy it's just it's just we're losing it into the wrong business system by doing the wrong things with it yeah so definitely be aiming for Beyond sustainability sustainability is not enough yeah exactly the short route is obviously if you can find a cradle to cradle certified product C2C product in your space and most of these products like a coyo is a natural word like Grafton Stone paint which we mentioned earlier they are Global you can get them just about anywhere there are very few territories that don't you know where you can't actually access these materials and the exciting thing is there are now 75 000 ish products that are 35 000 as well you made some progress the last few weeks it has I mean it was literally we did a big exhibition in March and we had the Cradle to cradle products Innovation Institute join us they are our knowledge Partners yeah and at that point they had a 75 000 um known rate of of products and materials and literally I think it was literally Paul mentioned about two days ago that they're now up to 75 000 so it's increasing it was 45 wasn't it it was 45. 5 000 and went up yeah yeah that's why I've read in here oh my yeah yeah exactly exactly so it's very very exciting what they're doing as I said it's increasing exponentially they've got a fantastic group of very smart chemist Engineers um and and designers in This Global assessor Network so whether you have um you know if you can't access the product they can actually innovate products as well and that's what they spend a lot of time doing so let's say you have a very unique product that you need for a very unique scenario you actually are able to access these partnership networks to help you to help you innovate but realistically and since the built environment is the area that they are most robust in since the whole um Cradle to cradle ethos and philosophy and and ultimately the framework came from a architect and a chemist and so it's it's very it's very robust and as as I mentioned to you mark they are a fantastic case studies to look at for example Park 2020 in the Netherlands the World Health Trade Center um called the Zen project in Belgium they've just established a 95 success rate for cradles cradle certified products and urban mind products which basically just means using products in the local vicinity and that's you know that's that's a really durable a real a real really doable thing these days it's not like you only get one product and the rest have to be linear design products it's very very practical very um accessible and in most cases it's now profitable because if you look at how you um look at budgets and and price points instead of looking at the price at uh price of purchase or point of purchase you look at it over its lifespan these products are usually very robust and usually best in sectors Paul mentioned earlier so the price over the time span of your product it's usually a uh it's usually a profitable scenario and there's a lot of cases to prove that so that's you know there's no real reason not to do it anymore no no and I can imagine that if we increase the demands for good healthy products people need to shift their their their their mind on the production side of the suppliers clients are demanding for other stuff absolutely and we we're still seeing a lot of myths that we need to bust you know we had a meeting with the other day and back to pain somebody said oh but do you have a color range or do you only have whites you know yeah for example grafenstone can match any Ral literally because they can color match and their own ranges you know I think it's about 360 460 products something like that yeah you're a very difficult designer when you don't find the right match so you have the horrible point when they are in effect and they and they're absolutely fine with an Ral match absolutely you know gone are those days where sustainable products are rare Commodities or low performing or you know made of beeswax in the local beehive from the back of your garden you know gone are those things these are very intelligent Brands like mozartiles we mentioned to you and Mark you know in your backyard mostatized you know brilliant porcelain tile one of you know one of the most robust brilliant um brands in the world when it comes sustainability and they just achieved cradle to cradle certified at gold for nearly their entire range so whether you're looking at for carpets or paint or wood and there's very little that can't be done and we we actually did the proof of concept in London recently where and it's not quite complete but we've managed to do Cradle to cradle certified products for an entire retrofit including the glue that we use with mosa tiles so there's very little that can't be done and if you know there's new people in our struggling to keep up and we we're in this space all day long Paul gets feeds to tell him what's going on um so it's a bit like technology it's moving very very fast so anything in your head I'm talking to your audience or anything in your head that you think oh well is it going to be as good I would say it's going to be better is it going to be more expensive I'd say no over the term it's likely to actually be a profit more profitable project and you know the Aesthetics are fantastic you don't have to worry about the Aesthetics just absolutely incredible products yeah because that's that's what we I will also design we're all looking for this beauty and the Aesthetics in the environment because it's well Beauty makes you literally if you talk about science and in a few weeks we have uh I'm not going to mention your names yet but uh two uh people for the for a designer talked about beauty and science because it's really it's it is science that beauty affects us on our happiness as well and on our health so it's a it's it's kind of important that we uh as designers as well that we try to test and tweak and demand for the products and like if if it's not what we like to see that we challenge the well I could say the chemists the the innovators the biologists the engineers come up with yeah even more beautiful uh products and just say oh it's not on the market I'm mad and God so is that is there an opportunity for you on a platform to ask those questions if people are uh have any questions or demands for special products or uh well I know you're mentioning this later where are we giving your audience access to some freebies and part of that is consultation but there are there are ways of accessing and we'll we'll wrap that up as well at the as an endnote um to to find these materials but usually when people actually find out you know they're looking for a stone surface you know we're in one particular Cradle to cradle certified uh Stone manufacturer I mean I I Paul and I lost count after 48 pages linear lines of every single SKU that they have you know okay you must count I mean that's just a stone product we went to see their showroom and it was mesmerizing to see how beautiful their products are and I'm not you know we speak about beauty sometimes in a way that's a bit derogatory these days and that's actually not true so when I did my my um optimizing human health aesthetic is actually one of the key functions so there is Arrangement and design but it is the aesthetic as part of as part of the arrangement part of the design what we see is incredibly important the tactile aspect of it you know what it feels like what it looks like actually has a huge impact on our on our mental health so you know I was literally looking at mental disorders and Rehabilitation times and how we arrange and what our materials are literally have a definitive impact an objective marker impact on our health so you know you know we mentioned this but it is critical and unfortunately Cradle to cradle certified products um know that so they don't usually just do one you know one healthy tile and the rest is unhealthy yeah it's like most of they've done this incredible range because they understand that you know we want to continue doing the important things but we also need to have and you know I don't like using the word sustainability I prefer using regenerative design because sustainability is just repeating the status quo it's actually part of a degenerative design system so we need to challenge that that language as well yeah we generated yeah so beauty is regenerative right because when you adore a product when you love it so much yeah you're servicing it you're you you want to keep it you don't give it away you don't throw it away so that's that's a that's a cool aspect sometimes the products that are maybe they're not healthy mates but there are some products in design world that lasts so long even when you look at it it's not it's not the best product quality but the beauty is so good and people are just think and there's this vintage level or those golden labels in design worlds and it's so funny this is so so beauty is an important factor of sustainability as well because if we if we like if you think some something is ugly or the building is actually there's a big chance we're going to demolish the building in a few years again even when it's made with the best materials but that's in um it's a challenge too right absolutely and and the good thing is you can have it all and you know you really can you don't have to actually go oh well I want to do Sustainable Building and it's just going to be made of you know Agnes lime washing hay or something that's not that's not the case at all in fact you know when when people actually discover these materials for example go back to okoya usually um and historically we don't usually use a lot of wood in bathrooms because for the fact that it moves and it rots and it swells and the paint peels off and all that sort of thing so we tend to use other materials but now with the koi you can actually do that because it doesn't actually absorb the the water it doesn't expand and twist so therefore you can actually use it in its natural state or you can put coatings on it and last much longer and you know the guarantee speaks for themselves it's 50 years above water and 25 years in water and that's that's the product that Paul and I specified uh to the to the environment agency for the world's first um Fender in the Thames Estuary and we've now seen that and how robust that's been over the last couple of years that's that's a plain radial to Pine uncoated in a setting where it's got to deal with salt water fresh water tides animals all sorts of things and it's still it's absolutely robust and beautiful so you can now use that for entire cladding inside bathrooms and outside in decks and around pools and fountains and all sorts of things which couldn't which couldn't be done before so actually I would argue that these regenerative design cradles cradle certified products gives More Design freedom and more robustness more durability than actually we're familiar with so when you start thinking about laminated products you know how they pull apart and you've got the glues and you've got all these things you don't have to have that anymore with with some of these products it's absolutely incredible what they've mastered and some of them take 15 years Cradle to cradle okoya took 15 years to finally develop to develop this particular material and we've seen Google use it now on their King's cross outside mullions facing the weather beautiful you know malians instead of uh PVC or upvc or aluminum that people tend to use for Windows so now we've got wood mullions and we used we we saw cradle cradle certified product being specified for the Microsoft Office in offices in London and several of them were taken up by Microsoft both for Munich and for London so we we're seeing you know big Brands who who have the smarts and have the teams who can research some of the stuff yep you can bring that in into projects like we say the environment agency we've seen Jacobs Engineering here in the UK they're the biggest engineering company in the world and using it for products so as a designer whether you're you know doing residential products and you're smaller your one-man show or whether you have a huge team or you're part of a multi-global um design team you can confidently use cradles cradle certified products and that was something the environment agency spent I think a year or two doing their due diligence on all the credit on all the global standards that are out there and came back to us um and said you're right it is it is the best um it is the best of the standards that align with our purposes obviously they're different standards for different things but for materials and and products and for regenerative design cradle scale certified is hands down by country mild the best yeah so well yeah lovely to hear that I think you made a lot of listeners following very excited and curious when you talk about the wood and all this well Innovative technical products that they look at really natural let's call it in that way because well especially right now in the area we're living we're looking for this biofilly design and all these terms that we have one to get connected with nature again and then sometimes people are showing as the world of really technical nerdy AI uh all this stuff is coming from the other side where we are grating for the other world so if the connection is possible and we don't have to do all the maths and the formulas and all the technical reasons to that and there's an opportunity to just actually well I had my first impression was I I'm going to create my own library from products that I will find on your platform that are matching my signature or my clients or my people and let's find a way to communicate up front that's why we love always to communicate with your audience with your clients with your which you create team as we call them that's you would like to use these kind of materials that it is part of your mission a part of the application you're allocating the client so that you keep them awake like hey you are the painter have you ever thought about this bread where can you get it where can you order it here's the link and I want you to use this for the whole product product for the whole project sorry yeah absolutely so that is one way of doing it we have seen quite a few clients doing that we've seen teams and we recently made a big architectural firm they've created what they call a Thrive team which is literally to look at all the products the the usual specifiers and procurement would be looking at and then putting that through this additional filter of regenerative design or sustainable Beyond sustainability so they have a they've set up a whole department doing exactly this work looking at everything from carbon to some other so they were testing what they always advise and then and and in some way they replace some private cemeteries absolutely so they've realized they need to go beyond sustainability they need to go beyond just the usual way of finding linear uh linear designed products and we've seen that in in infrastructure as well we're seeing that they are no longer just going well we just we just want a pipe or a concrete or a this or that they're actually starting to say well what else is there what is better and you know even with the okoya fender for example the first iterations of the fenders were brilliant because they had no bad Coatings for the the Thames Estuary so it was great for um fauna and Flora to sort of latch onto it but they went further and we challenged them and this is the kind of thing that we say is it's not just about the material or the product it's all about how are you setting it in how are you mounting it are you able to demount it in the 50 years or the 20 years or the five years or the six years if you're a Leisure industry designer you know how are those access points designed into your into your thinking and into the client's conversations the briefs as I said right from the beginning look at the ambition levels the briefs and the contract make sure it's right up there so that you've challenged them in six years time when you come back to me and say right I want to redesign this you know are we placing the mirrors set in and glue that we can't then access them and we're just going to smash them to get them down or we're looking at demountable mirrors demountable tile systems now exist you don't need to smash tiles anymore you cannot just didn't want them there's so many amazing things that uh that can be done so it's really important to challenge yourself a bit and and challenge your clients to think differently and think next iteration and what we like to say next use or reuse as opposed to you know one-off use um that single-use idea and it really needs to go it needs to shuffle off and rest in peace um but if we look if we look at the whole circularity that Paul mentioned earlier we're looking at the sourcing that's traceable local Urban mining reusing where possible and that's another thing you know clients used to not want to use materials that have been used before everybody wanted new and I think we've gone beyond that I think we realize new is a little bit taboo now we actually really need to reuse we had a fantastic Stockholm case study um a while back where they they saved the client 60 of the client's budget by actually looking at what was existing and recovering furniture and reusing and repairing and did an incredible job they still met the objective of creating this great new office space

we are surfing uh premium premium clients high-end clients for residential design but we do have 11 principles and one of them is that we we don't not everything has to be has to be new and it's what sometimes they are like I have it I like new one except hey what what about me what what is it about new is it how is it how does it feel for you what is it and if you can get to the core of the question and that's very important as a designer what what is it what what is new doing with them or gonna be that it is way more meaningful and important for them to use the right materials and that they have a whole other self-fulfilling idea this Fresh Start or better start RBC live or the next level they have all these people have other excuses reasons to have a new environment they want to be the most better person or to level up but what could this level of be and so if you ask if we uh asking better questions to our clients if it's what what could be the challenge if we might have a look and you have to if you can get the opportunity to have a look at it with this kind of perspective exactly and we often ask them the question a different question we'll say to them What story do you want to have at the end of your design would you prefer to say yeah What story do you want to have what do you want to Market you know what is your Brand's value and the Goodwill that you'll get out of it so we actually had that very sincere conversation with Microsoft's designers some time back and their designers had designed in a way that we we challenged some of the things some of the materials and they were they did they did the Judas they went back to Microsoft they had the conversation and they came back to us and they said actually that's you know we hadn't thought about it quite like that and and willing we actually would prefer to come out with a a robust story that says we are actually using products that are verified assessed certified good for the planet as opposed to necessary it looks good or it's this sort that or to the next thing so sometimes no matter who the client is they're willing to have that second conversation and we say I have it earlier if possible but have it throughout because they might not do it for this project but they might do it for next project so either way is use your influence wherever you are and don't be scared you know some designers going oh but I'm scared if I if I say that well my client you know not want to work with me or drop off actually I think they'll see you as more professional and they'll see you as being sort of differentiating yourself Cutting Edge bringing the new ideas to them you can't force them you can't force anyone to do what no but you people will you will be surprised as a design if you've gone up with this subjects that people people it's all around you and absolutely and now it's now it's living in this type of phase of living or they're building a new shop or a business or whatever and it just adds up to what you're doing with maybe completely or whatever so and when you explain yeah and then explain to them what that glue or what that paint is off-gassing or what that sofa with a um a non um solid material would base has because it's off guessing formaldeh

and probably we have way more because now we're actually really talking that you really want to convince us to start uh designing sustainable and uh we generate it uh so it's wonderful and the best way to start with it and that's what that's at the end that's why I invited you to the podcast your boat Paul you are a little bit in the backyard the last few minutes but we know this was going to happen uh that's perfect how you work together yeah it's the interior architect so it's it's all it's very apt but I just I just wanted to really add that um you know the time to do this work is is is really beneficial now because it's like when I first started doing this it was quite tricky you know there was just white paint and you you had to kind of um you had to kind of just go well if I'm gonna do this stuff I'm gonna have to you know just have the white one and then the colors came and then the the opportunities came and then the 70 000 products came you know it's like it's such an exciting time now to be doing this work and this technology that can make this stuff much easier like you talked about material libraries there's technologies that can actually because CTC for me it's like the ID it's like this is what this thing is we know what it is now but what we don't want to do is get it lost so the technology is available now that you can put an ID on that thing keep it in a system and it's actually an asset suddenly you know you're taking off the wall or you're doing this thing and it's become more valuable well it's been sitting there in in your workplace or your home or whatever so they're as the assets they're Investments uh some of these things now so you can you can I see you know there's evidence out there particularly like the last few years where products you specify them by the time you actually delivered them into the project the price was twice as much you know you imagine that's in your your project for five years and the same kind of conditions are going on you've suddenly got all these assets around you that are increasing in value it's a completely different way of looking at design you know it's it's very exciting yeah it's it's wonderful you've got you're doing a great job what we will do is we go to share the link to your uh platform but because people can get free access to it the 550 world through the directory for all these products and services and all the information was there with this really scientific certified people that did their research on the different level levels we uh we spoke today so it's uh we can generally say that this at the moment is probably one of the best places to go to for to check if you're um healthy regenerative designer so thanks a lot because um well sharing this podcast with our Global Community with beyond the terror design Club it was uh well probably way more effective than the few Pro projects we are doing on the on a yearly day so I'm glad that I could share your story and um yeah we even reached way more people right now so um I do hope a lot of people will take action on your birthday message because we have to take care of this world it's a small uh it's a small planet and um only together we have the power to design this world thanks um thanks Mark and Sven and and Paul and thank you the audience then and it'll be probably some questions and it will be hanging around a bit for a while Paul for Mark when is the sort of time timeline yeah for people if you have uh yeah any further questions uh you can uh you can ask him you can ask Paul Angeline for um for that but uh yeah thanks again for uh yeah for the for the wonderful story and then for your uh yeah for your invitation to uh so people can reach out to you for their questions and you can connect with them on LinkedIn of course our favorite platform you can you can find them over there we will put the link in the in the bio of the of the podcast and on our website on the blog so well and I think it's just nice to to remind everyone there at least four access points so for people new to all of this you might want to read the Cradle to cradle remaking the way we make things book which is absolutely brilliant just to get a really uh great overview of everything and you can obviously contact 540 world and the website is really easy you can you can email us at info at 540.world and but also you can go to the Cradle to cradle products Innovation Institute there's a product registry there which shows you the material Health Products certified products and the cradles cradle uh certified products um so and then you can also go to 540 world's website and there's a free uh downloadable directory group called The C2C design directory and I to say it's the world's first national directory so it is specific to the UK but a lot of those products are Global so it's a good place to to have a look um if you if you and we update that monthly so there are new ones coming to you but being 70 plus Pages we know any other 75 000 products listed so I'd advise uh have a look at both and then there's a circular Design Network that we're doing in the UK which everybody's welcome to join if you want to know more about what's going on yeah yeah it's growing every day the numbers the collections yeah the the the all the the researchers they are doing so that's it's that's that'll be the good news of what's going on right now everybody needs this is the solution to uh to continue so uh yeah thanks again