Look out for our next Design Trend – the Eco Way ‘Decorating with Florals’

Walls

Paint

Wallpaper

Tiling

Soft Furnishings    

Now that the incandescent lightbulb has been removed from the shop shelves we are all adjusting to the shape and light of the low energy lightbulb. But how many of us are put off by the size and odd shapes of the standard CFL bulbs out there? As a designer, I am appalled to see the tubular top of a low energy bulb sticking out of a beautiful wall light or chandelier where a lovely candle bulb used to sit.

With the new range of retrofit low energy bulbs available at www.geccointeriors.co.uk this problem is a thing of the past. The range includes lovely shaped candle and golf balls for all types of fittings, they use just 7W instead of 35W and cost just £3.98 each.

Check the new low energy light bulb range out today and make your wall-lights beautiful again!

According to the environmental website Treehugger, Kevin loved the idea of using stinging nettle fibres mixed with wool to create the fabric and feels that this product should be getting more exposure. We certainly agree!

Check out the wonderful story behind Sting upholstery fabric (£34.00/m), available in 8 colourways designed to reflect the colours of the British hedgerows and one of the best-sellers at Gecco Interiors.

Traditionally, dry cleaning meant cleaning clothes in liquids other than water and the solvent of choice was perchloroethyene or ‘perc’. This has since been proven to be a nervous system depressant and under US federal standards is listed as a hazardous air pollutant. An alternative method had to be found. Three new methods were favoured – washing with liquid CO2 in high pressured machines, using a silicone based solvent and finally, but much less effectively washing with regular water in computer controlled machines.

Discarding the latter due to poor results, lets look firstly at CO2. Normally present in gas form, CO2 transforms into a liquid under high-pressure. In specially designed machines clothes are washed at 900llbs per square inch of pressure in liquid carbon dioxide and a surfectant (specialist detergent). After the clothes have been washed and rinsed, the CO2 is collected and reused. Several US textile companies have already started using this system commercially, but it is not common in the UK.

The stronger candidate for widespread ‘green dry cleaning’ comes from a group of ex-dry cleaners who have developed a system called Green Earth Cleaning. This system uses liquid silicone (a liquid version of sand) which is a naturally occurring material and is already used as the base material for many shampoos and soaps on the market today. Textiles cleaned using liquid silicone do not lose their colour, do not shrink and come back feeling softer than before because the silicone is inert and doesn’t react with the fibres of the fabric in an aggressive way. It can even be recommended for the most delicate of fabrics. The best thing about this method of cleaning is that there are no nasty residues. When the silicone breaks down it forms three natural ingredients – water, carbon dioxide and sand.

Liquid Silicone appears to be the method of choice for UK Dry Cleaners and it is already available on the High Street!

To find a ‘Superhome’ near you, check out the website or visit the Great British Refurb Campaign to find out more.

Off to a landfill near you!

One new company is leading the way, building their own plant to take some of the carpets, break them down and sell their component materials on as raw materials to other industries from polypropolene and nylon to wool, hessian and jute. Greenback Recycling are even working with local authorities and have managed to get dedicated carpet recycling containers placed at local recycling collection points. They intend to spread this plan nationally.

Until then, it is worth checking with your local authority to see if they take carpet for recycling. If not, what else can be done?

- If it, or a large part of it, is in good condition try offering it on Freecycle. You never know, someone could be waiting for that particular posting!
- Offer it to local schools or preschool groups
- Reuse it yourself as a good insulator in an attic room or outdoor shed or even to cover the compost heap
- Offer it to local gardening groups or allotment societies who can use it on their compost heaps

A recent competition was set up by the campaign for one lucky winner to receive all the upgrades needed to create a low energy home. The winner Will Homoky was present at the conference and described the upgrades (valued at around £23,000) that his house had received:

* Interior wall & loft insulation

* Solar Panels

* Balloons in unused chimneys to stop draughts

* New composite doors and thermally insulated glazing

* Smaller Radiators

* Unit to lower voltage coming in through the electricity mains

How had this changed Will’s energy statistics? The results were astounding, as he achieved an 80% drop in carbon emissions and better still a 123% drop in energy bills – Will can now make money on electricity produced by his solar panels through the new Feed-in-Tariff coming in April.

A fantastic result I am sure you’ll agree, but how can the majority of the public carry out similar works? There are many hurdles to overcome

-          Financial : many householders simply cannot afford it

-          Destruction : the complete house might be affected and occupiers will need to put up with a lot of disruption during the works

-          Motivation : many people lack the belief that they need to reduce their personal carbon footprint

-          Industry infrastructure : currently we are as a nation lacking in the skills and infrastructure necessary to carry out the works on a large scale

Clearly, these are big issues that need discussion at the highest levels of our society.

Government is moving in the right direction with schemes such as CERT and CESP both of which help financially with grants for upgrades but can only cover around 1.5m houses per year. If we are to tackle 26m houses much more is needed.

Yesterday Ed Milliband introduced a new scheme in which homeowners can take out a ‘green loan’ for energy efficient upgrades. This loan will be set against the property and will be sold on to the next occupier as the house is sold.  This is once again a step in the right direction but will not help out the millions living in social housing or close to the poverty line who do not own their own houses. Can landlords and housing associations finance the necessary upgrades?

There is clearly no easy answer and we will be following the debate with interest in the run-up to the election. Check out the Great British Refurb Campaign website who will be posting summaries of the three main political parties housing policies over the coming months. It is sure to be an interesting debate.

Most importantly of all, sign up to the campaign and make it clear that if we are to achieve the targets set for carbon reduction we are all going to need a little help and we are definitely going to need to work together.

As an eco interior designer, I am worried about the in-roads being made in the building industry towards air-tight housing that provides this optimum insulation and minimal heat loss. Has anybody considered the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in this new building style? By now, we are more or less aware of the chemical cocktail building up within our homes. Many of us are aware of the term ‘off-gassing’, the process by which chemical compounds and VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) evaporate from items in our houses such as paint, wood stain, varnishes, plywood, carpets treated with pesticide and stain repellent, upholstery treated with FR treatments such as bromide and MDF containing formaldehyde. The list goes on and the cocktail remains untested.

Many of the chemicals in everyday building materials and furniture have been tested alone but every home has a different mixture and the cumulative effects of those have never been tested.  However, the symptoms of the off-gassing have been recorded by experts as “puffy red eyes, watery eyes, runny nose, congestion, coughing, full blown asthma, skin irritation, rashes, itching and hives” (Dr Clifford Basset, Vice Chairman of Public Education Committee of American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology). Brominated FR treatments and some carpet pesitcides and stain repellents have been proven to be persistent and cumulative; many are hormone disrupters and some even carcinogenic.

A recent experiment and now best-selling book ‘Slow Death by Rubber Duck’ written by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, looks at the effect living in a normal home with everyday products can have on toxic levels in our bloodstream. The results are more than a little worrying.

In our enthusiasm and drive to move closer to energy efficient and air tight housing, let us not forget that we also need to remove the chemical threat from our living environment. It is time to move over or rather move back to natural building materials and to look at how we decorate our homes. It is a personal challenge that any private individual can undertake. The solutions are out there but until regulations are in place will large developers really change the products they put into their housing estates or flats?

In Tirupur, India for example, the vast amounts of salt discharged in waste water into local rivers (up to 10tonnes per day)* made the water undrinkable. The high levels of salination in the water even prevented the local farmers from using it on their land. Local government regulation has since stopped this practice and the manufacturers are forced to look at alternative methods of dyeing their fabrics with less salt.

Some would say that this can be likened to closing the door after the proverbial horse has bolted and that manufacturers need to change their methods now, before any more damage in done.

So what of those textile producers that are looking at change? What is currently being done to improve the bad name of textile production?

Raw Materials

A selection of new natural raw materials is being brought into textile production that has increasingly relied on man-made fabrics. In fact, some of these materials were used historically but went out of fashion as mass production became key. Some new materials include: organically produced cotton and wool, linen, silk, hemp, ramie, bamboo viscose, tencel and flax.

Increasingly, textile producers are looking towards recycling as a solution with the improvement in methods of recycling PET plastics and polyesters. Tanneries are even reclaiming the off cuts from their hides that would normally have gone to landfill and turning them into recycled leather.

Water Usage

The vast quantities of water needed to produce fabrics, continues to be the bug bear of many when looking at greening-up the industry. Different Manufacturers are using different methods to combat this issue. Some are looking into new methods of dyeing without using salt such as ‘continuous dyeing’ and ‘cold pad batch dyeing’, thus removing the need to rinse and dilute the salt effluents away.

Other companies such as O Eco textiles will only work with textile mills that have built their own water treatment site in order to tackle the problem at source. Camira Fabrics in Yorkshire have drilled their own bore hole on site which does not need to be treated to drinking water standards. In addition, the Jetvac continuous scouring machine recently installed, gives Camira a water usage reduction of 33%.

Dyeing & Finishing

Dystar is a leading dye supplier in the ‘green’ sector and has built a reputation on delivering an environmental answer to the chemical content of mass produced dyes. Even when using water based, solvent free dyes there are however, many other issues to consider such as the salt additives needed to fix the dyes to the textile fibres, or the bleaching methods used on the raw fibres prior to dyeing.

Once again, some companies are looking for their manufacturing partners to innovate and come up with cleaner processes. O Eco Textiles pledge that all of their partners try to use oxygen-based bleaching processes, soften their fabrics with Aloe Vera and bees wax and use biodegradable detergents and surfectants in their production.

Certification

The only way forward in this complex issue is to dig deeper when sourcing or buying fabrics for the green home. Certification is the one sure fire method of determining whether your fabric of choice meets your environmental code. Ask for details from the supplier about any certification that the fabric may have such as GOT’s, Oeko-Tex, Control Union or Soil Association. These labels are run to very strict codes and are possibly the only way that we can trust in the products we buy. For this reason we insist on listing the certification and/or environmental credentials of each of our fabrics at www.geccointeriors.co.uk. For clarification on the different certifications check out our Eco Info section.

In 4 halls of the NEC, I spotted one small sign for PEFC timber and just two companies selling products made with the planet in mind – one of those was a Portuguese company over here for the first time.

One other company handed out free bags to entrants advertising special ‘trade show’ deals. One such deal offered an upholstered dining chair covered in ‘eco leather’ selling at a trade price of £42.99! As a retailer of recycled leather and knowing the prices involved I was intrigued to find more. I spoke at length to one of the sales people who was surprisingly knowledgeable about the recycled leather he was selling. The product was indeed waste off-cuts from hides used in the tanning industry that were headed for landfill. This waste product was then shredded to form fibres, which were then bonded back together and given a PVC coating for durability. This is in fact how recycled leather is made and it has environmental credentials because it diverts a waste product from landfill. I enquired about the sales for this particular product. Recycled leather cannot be sold as ‘leather’ because it is classed as bonded fabric and so it has a lower price point. That is the reason for any sales made – i.e. lower price points!

Speaking later with the one FSC certified company in the whole show, they had received a great deal of interest. Their stand was suitably decorated with a large overhead hoarding depicting the great work that their chosen charity Tree Aid was doing in the third world. The FSC logo was clearly visible and many people stopped to ask about the bedroom ranges on offer. The reaction from the industry however was incredulity. What was this FSC logo all about? How do you expect to compete with prices that are so high? I can buy that bed frame for my shop for half the price in another hall! Once again price point is king!

Interestingly, when I spoke at length with the Portuguese company, whose business ethos was built around sustainable design and production, they informed me that on the Sunday, during public access, their stand had been extremely busy, but that interest had waned during the trade only days.

Perhaps it would be wise for those doing the purchasing in the furniture trade, to read up a little about how the products are made and the impact those products are having on the planet. In addition they might want to check if the consumers give a damn, I think they could be surprised.