A fabulous wedding dress caught my eye as I strolled along St Andrew Street in central Dublin a few weeks ago. Flamboyantly quirky, it was a creation you might expect Bjork, the Icelandic singer, to step on stage in, more Little Bo Peep than the swan dress she wore to the Oscars. It had four layers of puffball petticoats, the off-white flouncing skirts bleeding into a wine-coloured rim.
I doubt many brides will be sporting the creation. For one thing, it's made from paper. Recycled paper at that. And the Celtona wedding dress wasn't for sale. It was one of the wackier exhibits at the International Design Resource Awards show at ENFO, the environment-information agency, last month.
Avant-garde, funky and environmentally friendly as it was, it wouldn't be too practical a choice, even for the most Green of New Age brides. You could look very earthy and at one with nature, but you'd have to avoid rain, dance floors, smokers and physical contact in general.
But Bernadette Drenth, its Dutch designer, wasn't aiming for commercial success. She wanted to show how waste can be recycled. The same concept was behind the exhibition, which showcased product design and architecture that uses recycled post-consumer waste and sustainably harvested materials.
Post-consumer waste is, simply put, rubbish: newspapers, cans, containers, car parts, road signs, pallets and more. And, as with people who have had makeovers on daytime television, you hardly recognised them. Imagine coming face to face with your rubbish after it has metamorphosed into funky lamps, ethnic-style jewellery, fruit bowls, chairs or tables.
It was hard to believe a slinky chair designed by Frank Gehry, the architect best known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, was made from approximately 60 layers of corrugated cardboard. But on closer inspection, the layers revealed themselves to be just so: cardboard boxes engineered into a chair.
Pushed off shelves by CDs and minidiscs, vinyl made a comeback, but in the form of fruit bowls, their labels making their former use easy to spot. Among the bowls on display was one that had been a compilation of old-time croons such as South Of The Border (Down Mexico Way) and The Girl From Ipanema.
Glasses made from vodka bottles were among the most recognisable products. The clothes could hardly have been called fashionable. There was a range of wellies, available world-wide, that Dunlop makes by grinding down old boots; and overshoes, designed by the American Kari Erkkila using inner tubes, to protect your shoes in the rain.
Furniture accounted for a large proportion of the exhibits. Using recycled high-density polythene as their main material, designers from Italy to the US have created bright, cheerful and very 21st-century furniture. While the exhibition included Mad Hatter products such as the American designer Michael Culpepper's Eraser Chair, made from recycled felt, the majority of the designs were cutting-edge commercial products that would be more at home in trendy furniture shops or New York lofts than in a sustainable-design exhibition. Most are, or will be, in production.
A huge success in the US, the Aeron has become the office chair of choice for a generation of power brokers, featuring in magazines such as Business Week. Designed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick and made from recycled materials, it retails at around $750. When MIT set up MediaLab Europe in the former Guinness Hop Store, it brought its Aeron chairs with it from Boston.
Car tail lights and indicator covers were rehabilitated as Madame Ruby Table Lamps. Old detergent bottles appeared as lamp shades. A concoction of a garbage bag, wire mesh and coat hanger became a lamp, while bicycle parts were recycled as a clock and CD rack. Worthless waste became valuable commodities.
THE exhibition has moved back to Carigavon Industrial Development Organisation near Belfast before going to Glasgow, London and continental European capitals. The Waterfront Hall in Belfast was the location for this year's competition. Established in 1995 by Tom Johnson, a Seattle architect, to encourage commercially viable sustainable products, the annual project attracts top names from the design industry. Creativity was the key to kick-starting the recycling movement, says Johnson.
"My wife, Barbara, and I were distressed by the battle between the environmental and business groups in the early 1990s in our state of Washington. We thought that by creating a design competition that introduced recycled and sustainably harvested materials to the design community, they could evaluate and best understand the qualities of the materials. Our hope is that this creativity will lead to the formation of commercially viable product design and architecture which will also be in harmony with our environment."
Home to Microsoft, Starbucks, grunge and the first mass anti-globalisation protest, Seattle has gained a reputation as a forward-looking city. Clean Washington Centre, a state agency established to help create markets for recycled materials, provided the initial funding for the competition, and Microsoft and Boeing came aboard as sponsors. Seattle recycles more than half of its domestic and commercial waste; in the state of Washington, which is similar in size to Ireland and has just under six million inhabitants, recycling has created some 14,000 jobs.
In sharp contrast, the Republic recycles only about 5 per cent of its waste. ENFO says we dispose of 1,685,766 tonnes of household and commercial refuse in landfills each year. "The cost of disposing of this waste is a drain on the resources of local authorities in terms of landfill sites, transport and workers. There is also the loss to the economy of the valuable materials which are dumped," it reports.
The exhibition was a timely display. Finding a solution to our growing waste problem is a challenge facing authorities across the Republic. Plans to build incinerators have met with huge opposition. The small village of Ringaskiddy in Co Cork has found itself the latest rural location having to stand up against plans for an incinerator on its doorstep, in this case a £75 million scheme that could accommodate 200,000 tonnes of waste each year.
In Waste Management - Changing Our Way, a 1998 policy statement, the Government set a target of recycling 30 per cent of our waste, and paper, glass, oil, metals, plastics, clothes, rags, shoes, compost, batteries and other materials can be dropped off for recycling at more than 837 collection points.
The Government has also committed itself to reducing by half the amount of waste dumped in landfills. Johnson regards it as a great opportunity to rethink the way products are made, as well as how to reuse materials currently going to landfills. "Hopefully, in the exhibit are some ideas which might prove useful in helping make these transitions."
So let the contents of your dustbin bring you on an adventure into the future. It's time to embrace recycling and take a leap of faith to view post-consumer waste as a valuable commodity.
One apparently far-out architectural blueprint in the exhibition may too soon be upon us. Set in a landfill site and inhabited by vermin, bacteria and viruses, Garbage Park would be a working theme park where the daily flow of waste is a tourist attraction.
"Visitors can analyse decades of stratification of garbage and speculate about past cultures and social habits of certain periods," says the accompanying literature. It's creative, but Disney is unlikely to be interested.
Further information on the environment is available from the ENFO website, www.enfo.ie; the awards website is www.designresource.org