Rethinking Plastics in Product Design: A Guide to Sustainable Transitions for the Environmental Emergency

This book addresses the urgent need to reduce our use of virgin fossil plastics. It provides a framework for designers and manufacturers to re-evaluate their use of plastics and promotes the use of alternative materials with lower environmental impacts.

Lightweight, strong and cheap plastics are often the obvious choice when designing consumer durables, but their use is resulting in devastating health and environmental consequences. Recycled plastics and bioplastics are often suitable replacements; however, mechanical and aesthetic differences mean working with these materials is often challenging and expensive. In this book, Geoff Isaac outlines strategies for developing more environmentally friendly design solutions and provides practical guidance for designers who seek to use plastics more sustainably.

Chapters include case studies selected from sixty chairs made from renewable plastics, as chairs are often developed to showcase the potential of new materials and their suitability for applications across other consumer products. The book also features interviews with a range of industry representatives and international designers including Philippe Starck, Barber Osgerby, Konstantin Grcic, Bertjan Pot and Karim Rashid to illustrate recent designs using renewable plastics. This book provides an empowering blueprint for designers to make environmentally responsible decisions in today’s business landscape

Geoff Isaac is a casual academic at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where he completed his PhD on the history of the plastic chair and designing for the environmental emergency. He has written papers for journals such as Plastiquarian, Journal of Applied Psychology and Fusion Journal, and his book, Featherston, on the life and work of the industrial designer Grant Featherston, was published in 2017.