Sustainability, Potted: The Potted Carbon Planter
A new product is changing our idea of ‘waste’ by turning organic waste into beautiful products.
Every day truckloads of organic materials mixed with non-organic garbage are transported over long distances to landfills where they are piled together for the indefinite future. These organics layer up under non organic materials like plastics that cut off their access to oxygen, causing them to decompose anaerobically and release methane. Methane is over 20 times as powerful as CO2 in its ability to warm the planet, meaning these landfill emissions from organics amount to over 20 million cars added to our roads every year!
OurCarbon™, produced by Bioforcetech, is made of organics that have been diverted from landfill. The organics are completely transformed through Bioforcetech’s energy neutral process that sanitizes them and locks their carbon in place for thousands of years. The result is a clean, consistent, and useful base material with tons of potential.
Potted Carbon: Waste Based Beauty
Today, OurCarbon™ launched a new campaign on Kickstarter for a gorgeous planter with OurCarbon right inside it: The Potted Carbon Planter. It features a mix of OurCarbon and porcelain that are fine tuned to vitrify together when fired in a kiln. Once fired, the two materials are inseparable. This behavior is achieved thanks to the inclusion of waste silica that flows through our municipal systems known as ‘grit.’ The grit, usually seen as a nuisance to the waste industry, melts into a glass-like material during firing and then solidifies as it cools, binding the OurCarbon to the porcelain.
Sum Studio designed the shape of Potted Carbon. They note that ceramics play a huge role in telling stories about a society to their futures and that much of what we learn about past civilizations is from household ceramics like urns, pots, and altars. The studio designed Potted Carbon with the intention of creating an ideal ‘future artifact.’ With this design, they hope that our future generations can find this object and know that we saw our ‘waste’ as beautiful and utilized it to mitigate this climate crisis.
To get it all to work together, Bioforcetech teamed up with Break, an Oakland based design studio specializing in slip cast porcelain objects. Lawrence, the founder of Break, is hand casting and finishing each Potted Carbon planter.
One of the biggest tasks ahead of us in the effort to mitigate climate change is completely re-engineering what we do with our materials when we’re done with them. The ‘Blue Marble’ photo of 1972 showed a generation that there is no ‘away.’ Now, our generation is faced with this reality and a need to create systems where nothing can be called ‘waste.’ Projects like OurCarbon™ and campaigns like the Potted Carbon planter give us opportunities to work together in creating these circular economies.
