Case Study - Silo

Zero-waste cafe and Restaurant Silo draws abundant praise from everyone who encounters it, from food critics and customers to eco activists. Chef Douglas McMaster has developed a zero-waste system that includes no packaging whatsoever: food is sourced directly and daily from local farmers, producers and fishermen, and all waste is composted. A steel composting machine in the restaurant processes 60k of waste overnight and redistributed to the restaurant’s growers and customers. Silo even cultivates its own mushrooms in coffee grounds. To eliminate packaging, Silo mills its own flour (from ancient varieties of wheat) to make a delicious sourdough bread, and churns its own butter.

The aesthetic of the 150-year-old warehouse it’s in is suitably pared down and honest: whitewashed brick walls, rough floorboards and blackboards dominate, and furniture has been made from waste materials.

Stools and tables are made from OSB (an engineered wood-based panel) offcuts from Brighton’s Waste House, which also supplied the galvanised steel tops for tables and bar; cushions are made from 100 pairs of donated black-denim jeans, stuffed with old nylon tights. Plates made from recycled plastic bags are by Brighton product design graduate Louise Thilly.

The service kitchen was donated by Miele and its equipment is mostly secondhand and reconditioned.

A microbrewery has been added – the Old Tree Brewery – where exotic fermented drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are brewed.

McMaster says: ‘My business plan is to...show big business that this is important. We have already had huge…articles written about our approach.’ Audi magazine, BMW, Ikea and Smart Car have shown interest.

‘They’ve been...saying that’s really interesting, and positively promoting that through their publicity network.’

Case Study - LtDesign

Louise Thilly graduated from Brighton’s design & craft course in 2014, having been drawn – through her first passion of woodworking – into traditional construction methods. Her final year was spent finding ways of applying these skills to solve modern waste problems.

This is when she hit on the idea of making plates, placemats and more from plastic bags, following the ancient ‘rammed earth’ principles – melting the bags and compressing them into molds. all her construction and finishing skills from woodworking are applied to make furniture and other items from the incredibly strong material. Chef Doug McMaster saw some plates at her degree show, and asked her to make them for his restaurant Silo.

‘The university allowed her to use its workshop that summer, and the first batch emerged. She now has bought her own equipment and last summer she and a fellow designer took on a semi-derelict studio space in hove, now occupied by 12 makers. Thilly started off with high-density polythelene bags (the older ones), which made a very strong, robust material. Now she tends to use low-density polyethelene, which is more malleable, allowing for greater flexilibity in colour blending.

It’s a fantastic material to work with, she says. ‘It’s amazing how wood-like it is. every woodworking skill, every tool I used in my second year, can be used on this material.’ For her the aesthetic is part of the attraction: ‘I’m fascinated by the organic aesthetic of the material. It plays with people’s perceptions of plastics as a valueless and cheap material when, actually, it is an amazing feat of nature...’ She would love to see more designers being inventive with materials labelled as ‘waste’. ‘Sustainability and being resourceful is my backbone. after that it’s is just design. Problem-solving as a designer is everyday. Why not set yourself a challenge?’

Case Study - Place-Maker-Space

Preston Barracks was an army barracks that had been out of use for some 40 years before it was snapped up for redevelopment. While developer U+I, gets its act together, the space has been donated for uses that are – in true Brighton style – sustainable to their core: it is home to The Wood Store, a place where people can come to deposit – or find – waste wood products, and Brighton’s new Place-Maker-Space.

This is a place-making lab funded and sponsored jointly by U+I and Brighton University, and run by Nick Gant, the university’s assistant head of art, design and media, and leader of research into economic and social engagement. The most prominent roadside building has been given a lick of black paint and a basic interior refurb using as much recycled and waste material as possible. Inside, the main Place-Maker-Space features benches, a large table for stakeholder meetings and wall panels made from old wooden pallets. Its walls can be used for screenings, workshops or opened out to host larger gatherings.

The surrounding studios are being filled by local makers and graduate enterprises, including those working closely with the Place-Maker-Space to develop the best of digital, hybrid and analogue tools for community participation.

These digital tools are particularly useful in engaging children and young people and avoiding the phenomenon that Gant calls ‘Skatepark Syndrome’ (apparently, whenever children are asked as to what they would like to see in their area, they invariably respond ‘a skatepark’, usually for lack of awareness of alternatives).

Occulus Rift software, Minecraft gaming and 3D-printing can all be deployed to optimise interest and fun, with sometimes surprising outcomes: one recent consultation resulted in children creating a tapestry that represented their town, plus their thoughts about how their use of it might change as they age.

The tapestry is fringed with images of the children’s faces, digitally aged, and data has been embedded so that, when an iPad is passed over the images, an app captures the data to trigger animated versions of these characters, speaking their thoughts and insights.

Though the Place-Maker-Space’s shelf life may be limited – ultimately, the developer will want to build on the site – it will hopefully benefit all in the wider community.

Case Study - The Real Junk Food Project

Brighton’s Real Junk Food project has been running for more than a year, taking food that grocery businesses, farmers and wholesalers are throwing away and turning it into nourishing meals that people pay ‘whatever they can afford’ or nothing at all for, if needs be. Imogen Richmond-Bishop is one of the founding members of the Brighton arm of this pioneering UK enterprise. She says: ‘Since setting up last year we have intercepted some 25 tonnes of food, and fed nearly 13,000 people, including MPs, refugees in northern France, guests at weddings, and some 5,000 people in the space of two hours in a park in Brighton. We really have fed everyone.’

Although there is no shortage of waste food in the city, finding a regular space in which to cook and distribute it has been an issue. Up until February the project was able to operate only two ‘cafes’ a week. With an additional space coming on stream for three days a week in February, ‘we’ll be almost seven days a week, but in three different locations,’ says Richmond-Bishop.

Though spaces are always being offered, it’s consistency that is required, so that customers know where to come. She says: ‘There is so much support from the community. There’s a need for it. Though Brighton is a relatively wealthy city, there’s a lot of food poverty. There is 40 per cent food poverty in some areas.’

Students are among its most ardent supporters – and presumably, given their debts, customers. Says Richmond-Bishop: ‘We have had a lot of design students come to us as volunteers, to do design work for us, or coming in to take photos.

One person at the moment is making a book about us, and submitting it for a design competition. They are inspired by the idea of utilising waste, making it into a product that’s not waste, turning it into something valuable.’

Case study - Brighton Fashion Week

Nothing generates awareness, interest, and shifts in customer buying patterns like a big event. And last year, a first, Brighton devoted the entire theme and contents of its annual fashion show to sustainable design.

Brighton Fashion Week (BFW) started out as a Fringe event, called Brighton Frocks, a decade ago, but responded rapidly to the Rana Plaza disaster of 2013. (In this a cheaply constructed, eight-storey commercial building full of poorly paid garment workers collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,130 and injuring 2,500). The following year’s BFW introduced an element called Sustain, highlighting the need for a more ethical approach to fashion, with debates and featured designers. Interest was so great that 2015’s event was entirely given over to sustainable design.

Working closely with BFW director Liz Bishop was Siobhan Wilson, owner of Fair boutique (ethical fashion) in Brighton, as well as Cat Fletcher of Freegle. They sought the help of Orsola de Castro, founder of From Somewhere, and the Fashion Revolution, an ethical-fashion awareness-raising charity, in generating as much impact and interest as possible. It amassed not only an impressive roster of ethical designers and brands for the catwalk events, but also brought in talented young designers and challenged them to respond to the sustainability brief.

Featured brands included Brighton’s own Milkweed that creates textiles from locally sourced wool using natural dyes.

Wilson, who is now sustainability consultant on BFW, says that the ethical BFW was a massive success in generating awareness and profile for sustainable fashion: ‘The PR value was over £155,000 with readership of over 23 million, from 96 digital and non-digital publications covering it.’

For 2016, the sustainability theme continues, with the team looking to ‘take it to the next level’.