If you live in a city where plastic takeout containers are not recyclable, you may be feeling the same frustrations that we are. Those of us who can’t bear the thought of simply tossing the receptacles that hold our beloved chinese food, sushi, and wraps try to reuse them as many times as possible. But what could make people who don’t really care about the environment want to hold on to their food containers instead of trashing them? That is the question that designer Takeshi Miyakawa set out to answer. His solution? Shaping the containers to look like a childhood favorite that most adults find difficult to resist–legos!
Called Furniture to Go, Takeshi’s creations, which we encountered at offsite Design Week exhibition last weekInDisposed, are stackable just like the real thing. The legos can be configured in numerous ways to make chairs, tables, even walls! Although the containers don’t snap together the way that traditional legos do, they can support the weight of an adult as long as he or she maintains balance.
The concept of making something ordinary and mundane into something special and hard to throw away is something we think all designers should strive for. As an interesting aside, Takeshi claimed that he himself was not green in any way, but his apprentice Louis was quick to point out that his mentor rarely ever buys new clothes, saves scraps around the studio and does not even own a cell phone. Sounds pretty green to us!
Check out the entire gallery of designs from InDisposed here.
+ Takeshi Miyakawa
+ InDisposed
This doesn’t seem very useful. If the impact doesn’t change, you just have people hoarding garbage in their house instead of in a landfill. When they need to make up space, or move, or bore of having crudely fashioned, barely usable furniture, these will still be the first to go.
Making stuff isn’t inherently bad as long as that stuff doesn’t cause problems when we’re done with it. Materials-wise, unless these don’t just end up being trashed or downcycled, they’re just a feelgood perpetuation of the same-old, same-old (though now with the added impetus of feeding on current trends based on superficial reuse-o-philia).
why not carry your own reusable containers to the take-out restaurant? the average femme’s purse will hold them nicely, discretely.
hmmm, maybe i ought to practice what i preach? egad! does that mean i need to carry a man-bag? oh, the horror…