Hasta La Ideas

In what might be considered as the predecessor to greenwashing, the long-standing directive to buy products that are made from recycled materials is perhaps not necessarily the most eco-conscious option. For the latest issue of the eQ Journal, Sappi’s sustainability brand takes a deep dive into the pros and cons of post-consumer waste to impart a more nuanced understanding of recycled fiber and its unique constraints.

Some consumers focus on purchasing paper with a high percentage of recycled fiber. This drive for recycled content is often based on the false assumption that more recycled fiber in every product and paper grade is always better for the environment.

In reality, there are many other factors involved in the life cycle of paper, and these factors can only be fully understood and quantified by taking a comprehensive Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) approach. LCA accounts for the environmental impact of every step involved in the life of paper—this includes everything from material acquisition and processing to end use and disposal.

Sappi uses LCA to determine what applications of recycled fiber (and at which levels) can yield the most benefit. As it turns out, many Sappi papers that do not contain recycled fiber have a significantly lower carbon footprint than other papers on the market that do contain recycled fiber.

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Last Friday, we unfurled a brief history of golf ball design, but this post is gonna be all eye candy. Did you ever wonder what that crunchy urethane coating and creamy synthetic resin looks like from the inside? Well, so did photographer James Friedman, who found the inspiration for his latest photo series, “Interior Design,” in an unusual place:

Curiosity led me to cut my collection of golf balls in half to see what the cores looked like. To my surprise, what I found inside inspired me to consider that I could discover, in the unlikeliest of places, elegant formal qualities and surprising metaphorical possibilities. Interior Design has moved me to be enthusiastic about abstraction, an exciting corollary to my work as a documentary photographer.

Apparently in an effort to tweak the performance of golf balls, manufacturers have different “recipes” for the resin ingredients, leading to these wonderfully colorful blends:

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One of the most common and beloved packing materials now comes in a metal form.

Bubble wrap—first invented as three-dimensional wallpaper, believe it or not—started protecting valuables in 1960 and is branded by the Sealed Air company. It’s typically made from polyethylene, where a bubble-shaped side is bonded to a flat side.

The new metallic form can offer protection in very, very tight spaces, only a few millimeters thick. So packaging can be made very, very small and much stronger than the plastic variety. Computer and cell phone cases could be made much more thin and sleek. Computer parts could be protected with very little space used. Even helmets would not need to be as bulky. The protection offered is more heat and chemical resistant and more flexible than any other bubble wrap.

Making the metallic wrap is surprisingly simple. Afsaneh Rabiei, professor of engineering North Carolina State University, and her team started with a thin sheet of aluminum and used a studded roller to form small indents in the sheet. Instead of capturing air in these indentations, she filled them with a foaming agent like calcium carbonate or titanium hydrate. When such agents are heated they form bubbles within the metal, as you can see here:

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Like so many others, we were duly impressed with the first videos of Ross Nanotechnology’s proprietary superhydrophobic coating NeverWet when they hit the web just under two years ago. The product has since been licensed by Rust-Oleum, allowing “NeverWet to focus on developing and refining products without getting lost in the issues related to manufacturing and selling them.” The Lancaster Online article continues:

“We look at ourselves as an innovation company, not as a manufacturer,” [Daniel Hobson, NeverWet’s chief executive officer,] said.

The Conestoga Valley Industrial Park company’s first innovation began as its then-parent’s solution to a basic, industrial problem. About five years ago, Ross Technology Corp. needed a better way to reduce corrosion on the steel products it makes here. When they couldn’t find one, they decided to make something on their own.

But soon, the small group of scientists working on the anti-corrosive coating saw a lot of new possibilities for the nano-particle coating that kept things clean, dry and free of bacteria and ice. The group became Ross Nanotechnology, a subsidiary of Ross Technology Corp.

As of about four weeks ago, NeverWet has been available at Home Depot for just under $20 a pop. After seeing the video above and a similar (unembeddable) demo on the product page on Home Depot, I was strongly considering getting my hands on it to try it out… until I started reading the reviews.

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It’s been a while since we heard anything from Molo, the Vancouver-based design duo that famously brought paper to new heights—or widths, we should say. Architects and founders Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, who are “dedicated to the research of materials and the exploration of space making,” made a splash with their paper Softwall nearly a decade ago; they followed up with their killer Softseating, and for a period of time it seemed like you couldn’t go to a design gallery event or tradeshow without encountering either or both of the products. The ease of transporting the collapsible structures, the strength of their structure, the intelligent use of materials, and the sheer novelty made Molo the darling of design bloggers and racked up a list of design awards nearly as long as the objects themselves.

We’ve just looked in on them, and found Molo is now touting a new application for their expanding paper creations: Sound dampening. Turns out the right-angle-free, pleated honeycomb shape of their structures provides the perfect physics for sound absorption:

Laboratory testing of softwall’s absorption properties show that it scores very well, especially in frequencies of the human voice, in comparison to modern sound absorption tiling and baffles (meeting or exceeding common absorption coefficients) but with the added benefit of being adaptable, storable, and transportable.

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