In Europe and North America, we throw away around half of our food. Yet even in nations with scores of hungry and malnourished people, there are staggering levels of food waste. India alone wastes $14 billion of agricultural produce every year because it lacks the infrastructure to bring harvests to market without spoiling. I know this because I’ve been reading Tristram Stuart’s book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, an enlightening, well-researched and passionately argued exploration into how the world’s surplus food mountains are an environmental liability — and a great opportunity.

When we talk I begin by asking him if there was a particular event that got him interested in food waste. “When I was 15 I got some pigs and I wanted to raise them in the most environmentally friendly way possible,” he says. That meant collecting scraps from his school kitchens, unsold bread from the local baker and potatoes from a farmer who gave away any spuds that were the wrong size or shape to adhere to retailers’ fussy cosmetic standards.

“I realized that I was turning landfill back into food,” he says. “And that the surplus food I was being given was perfectly fit for human consumption.” He also realized that he was merely scraping the surface of what was a huge problem, an idea that was further compounded by local supermarkets’ refusal to discuss their food waste.

Close to 20 years on and things have improved, Stuart says, but supermarkets still don’t publish figures for their food waste. Their reasons are usually twofold, he says. One is that this is “commercially sensitive data” which their competitors could learn too much from. The other reason is that they simply don’t want a much savvier, more knowledgeable public to know. Yet the net result of such findings being published would only be positive, Stuart says. “If supermarkets started publishing how much food they wasted, they would start competing with each other to waste less.” In the same way, if supermarkets learned from each other’s results, they would reach these targets faster and more effectively.

One way to reduce food waste almost instantly, and painlessly, Stuart says, would be to divert it to feed pigs and chickens. He believes that the U.K.’s pig and chicken farms are a major and untapped resource and that instead of (or in addition to) spending lots of money on anaerobic digestion plants, we should be “recycling our food waste as swill.” An EU ban on feeding waste food to livestock (instituted after the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001) prevents this currently, but even with the ban in place, Stuart says, there are still some foods that can be fed to livestock. He gives me an example: One of the major sandwich suppliers to U.K. retail giant Marks & Spencer was throwing away 13,000 slices of bread a day (four slices per loaf — both crusts and the slice inside the crust) until last year when a proactive environmental manager decided to start sending it to anaerobic digestion plants instead. In April this year the bread waste was diverted once more, this time to feed livestock. What makes this story even more compelling is how economically viable the move turned out to be. Instead of costing M&S $98.4 a ton to send it to an anaerobic digestion plant, they are now making $37.7 a ton by selling it to farmers, saving them $163,930 a year. “It’s a no-brainer,” Stuart says loudly.

Another no-brainer, it seems, is the impact of cheap food. The wealthier we have become in the West, the less of our disposable income we spend on food (about 9 percent in the UK versus 85 percent in Pakistan, for instance). Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Stuart believes that the solution is not necessarily raising the price of food, but rather educating people that food production causes a third of our global carbon emissions and, quite simply, is too good to waste: “We should be teaching our kids to grow food.”

If a fiscal incentive were introduced, it should be “to make wasting food more expensive, rather than food itself.” And, on a related note, to ensure that the all-powerful supermarket chains also bear the cost and problem of food waste, instead of simply pushing it up the supply chain. Retail giants are expert at making forecast orders of suppliers in advance and then dropping the order by half on the day itself, for example. “The suppliers have clauses in their contracts stating that they can’t sell to anyone else,” Stuart says. Plus, the goods may already be wrapped in the retailers’ packaging. Since the supermarket is paying only for the actual order, instead of the forecast one, it does not lose any money and has no incentive to reduce waste.

With the world already producing more than twice the amount of food we actually consume, Stuart thinks it is madness to deforest more of the globe to feed the billion people going hungry. We should feed them from what we already have.

This article first appeared on eco website mnn.com

Crossing the Serpentine Lake in London’s Hyde Park in total silence is one of life’s more pleasant experiences. The fact that one is moving at only five miles per hour could, in theory, taint the experience, especially in the speed-driven society we live in, but somehow it doesn’t. After all, when have you ever been on a boat sans the noise, pollution and emissions? And when have you been on a boat with an engine where once on you are still able to hear yourself think and take in your surroundings? The answer is almost surely never, until you board Christoph Behling’s 42-passenger Solar Shuttle (or any of his solar-powered ferries). Powered by a graceful canopy of 27 curving solar panels, the 48-foot-long shuttle was launched in London’s Hyde Park in the summer of 2006. Even on the sort of dark, rainy days that London is plagued with, there is enough sun to keep the ship running. And per year the boat saves 2.5 tons of CO2, compared with a diesel boat of a similar size.

So who is the man behind this elegant, award-winning and greener than green mode of transport?

Swiss-born Christoph Behling completed a Diploma in Industrial Design at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart in 1995, then spent a year in Tokyo working on a range of product designs from kettles to glassware for Masayuki Kurokawa. The products he was making were the “very pleasant sort” that you “could do without” he says, summing up the experience.

In 1996 he came back to Germany and thought “there must be something more than hanging nice pretty products in nice, pretty places,” he says. His fascination with solar technology started that same year when a solar cell landed on his desk. “I thought how magic it was that you could make electricity out of sunlight and this blue, sparkly thing.” At the time solar cells were mainly used on roofs or hidden away whereas Behling wanted to design something that expressed the magic of solar the same way he felt about it.

In 1997 he moved to London to join Ross Lovegrove for six years as senior designer, but it was during this time that he also set up and became creative director of Kopf Solardesign, a company that built solar-powered boats. At the end of 2005 he founded SolarLab Research + Design with an unofficial brief of converting people to solar and hydrogen through seduction. “We want to inspire people,” says Behling. “We want people to say ‘wow, this is better than anything I’ve seen’.”

Making things that are better than everything else out there is something Behling feels very strongly about. “I really don’t like that whole alternative energy and alternative design thing, I think it’s bullshit,” he says. “If you went into a shop to buy some shoes and they said, ‘We don’t have the shoes you want, but we have this alternative.’ [You would think] yeah, come on! I think we can only succeed if we create solar-powered cars, solar-powered boats, that are better-looking and better-working. If we do that then I think humans will be seduced and get inspired.”

There’s still a lot of negative prejudice floating around sustainable design says Behling, who moved to Stuttgart, Germany as a boy. He teaches at the RCA and even his design students assume that designing a solar or sustainable project is going to be a really dull experience. They ask him, “Why can’t we design a sexy chair or sports car.” His answer comes in the form of his boats that quietly prove that solar-powered boats can be damn sexy. In fact, when he and his team were designing the very first solar shuttle, he had two visuals on his desk he says. One was of a satellite “because solar cells were originally intended for satellites, to make electricity in space”, the other was a “yacht that was owned by the Kennedys”, and which the powerful, famous family cruised around the New England lakes on. These two images more or less merged into the design of the Solar Shuttle and inspired the team to make everything about the boat “special”. It was designed with light and sunshine in mind, Behling says. “We looked at shadows and what kind of shadow patterns were created on the deck, and we went a bit obsessive on the whole thing,” he says. But it was very much a celebration he concludes. Of what I ask. “Of sunshine and Jackie O,” he laughs. How atypical and non-hair-shirt is that as inspiration for a highly sustainable product?

Solar is not only sexy though, is also the future, for a series of eminently sensible and practical reasons. Not least because Behling’s boats and shuttles are designed to send any excess electricity created back into the National Grid. A process that can even make you some money says Behling, one of the biggest incentives there is for going solar he believes. “Depending on which country you’re in you get more or less money, it depends on how good the lobby of the energy providers are,” explains Behling. “In Germany it is quite a nice little moneymaker because there are high incentives.”

We should all be incentivizing solar and selling back to the grid it seems because the power that is fed into the National Grid is generated by coal and nuclear power plants that produce electricity 24 hours a day at the same rate. And as it is very difficult to increase or to lower this rate, that’s why electricity is a lot cheaper at night: “because we actually don’t know what to do with it”. Obviously a lot more power is needed during the day than at night, so “solar is fantastic because you feed into the grid exactly when the grid is most hungry” he explains. I am starting to see the appeal in a big way.

Future projects on the horizon for Solarlab include Olympic and commuter boats for the River Thames, solar powered rickshaws, floating houses where the solar cells always turn towards the sun, and a possible solar powered mosque. Behling has also produced a range of product designs for global brands including TAG Heuer and Nokia. As lead designer for Tag Heuer he is the man behind some of the most ground-breaking designs in watch-making. His fascination with light and energy led to the inception of his “diamond fiction” watch in which tiny LEDs change the colour of the stones to show the time. He and his team are also researching a new technology where products are not manufactured or assembled, but rather allowed to “grow”. When Dior approached him to design the perfume bottle of the future, he came up with a prototype that required only a computer, a laser and resin.

This technique is used “quite a lot in order to make a quick prototype” Behling says, but it is not currently used in manufacturing. It does away with waste, the need for huge machinery and tools and the need to source different parts from different suppliers, thus cutting down on the amount of energy required to make the product in the first place. The finished item has only one component, instead of 11, and like everything Behling designs it is exceedingly graceful-looking. If you are wondering how the perfume would come out of the bottle (so was I), it would come out like a spray once you pressed the bottle’s thinner parts (be it made out of resin, or a metal alloy, which Behling also proposes).

These perfume flacons of the future are not yet in production, but Behling believes they have, pardon the repetition, “a future”. Also because this technology could be used to make every bottle look very slightly different. And this is another important element in the Behling philosophy of design. All products look the same because they are mass-manufactured with tools he says, and the reason we don’t value objects more is because we know that if we chuck it out are “10 million” others just waiting to replace it. If the object you purchase is the only one in the world he posits, that makes it “a bit like a handmade object, and then it has a human relation to it.” Your reaction is no longer, ‘let me chuck this’, but rather, ‘maybe I will keep it’.

And this is just the kind of human interaction, inherent sustainability and visionary design that Christoph Behling and SolarLab are all about. Oh and the designs aren’t half sexy too.

This article first appeared in  issue 12 of Sublime (www.sublimemagazine.com)

Ever wandered around a UK high street, or even some of the country’s bigger supermarkets, and felt simultaneously abuzz with glee and utterly despondent? Cheap clothing is all around you. A pair of jeans will set you back a mere £7, a stylish jacket a trifling £15 and you can buy several T-shirts for only £10. And you won’t look cheap because the value retailers, as they are called, have become adept at copying what’s hot in high fashion and bringing it to you for a fraction of the price within days.

But here comes the ‘despondent’ part. There’s something that doesn’t feel quite right about a pair of jeans that costs as little as £7. If they cost so little to buy, how much did they cost to make? From growing and harvesting the cotton to dyeing and sewing the fabric. Above all, how much did the person making them get paid? And how many hours does s/he work a day? Christian relief and development agency Tearfund has estimated that only a tiny 0.5 per cent of the retail price of a pair of jeans actually goes to the worker. And this doesn’t even begin to factor in the issue of child labour.

Now that the floodgates have been opened, the depressing facts start coming thick and fast. The lifetime of an average garment is only three years says UK environmental charity Waste Watch. And 80 per cent of Britons have bought at least one item they have never worn, reports Oxfam. Once you are sick of them, or they fray, then what? Will you give your pair of denims to someone else, put them in a clothes recycling bin or simply throw them out, along with the 900,000 million other clothing items that get thrown away and sent to landfill in the UK every year? And, even if you do put them in a recycling bin, it is not a guarantee that they will be reused. With the quality of garments going down all the time, it turns out that only half the textiles we throw out are actually recyclable or reusable.

So what can we do about our cheap fashion addiction? And how can we help our already overstretched and fragile planet? Well we can start swapping. And this can be done in a variety of locales and ways: at home, online, at intimate gatherings of friends or even at wildly fun and anonymous parties.

Swapping, or ’swishing’ as the phenomenon is also known, is the new night out, and “so much more fun than normal shopping” says Virginia Rowe, founder of online mag & eco boutique StyleWillSaveUs.com and regular swapper. It is also the perfect antidote to the so-called ‘credit crunch’ and looming recession, and to that mass of unwanted (and often unworn clothing) that is filling up our landfills. (Waste Watch reports that synthetic and other man-made fibres do not decompose at all, while woollen garments do but produce methane in the process, an extremely damaging greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.) And, the thriftier among you will be delighted to hear that you will save oodles of money in the process.

Ultimately, clothes swapping is about treating your clothes with the love and respect they deserve. If everyone in the UK bought one reclaimed woollen garment each year says British fibre reclamation company Evergreen, it would save an average of 371 million gallons of water and 480 tonnes of chemical dyestuffs (that might make more sense if you knew that the average UK reservoir holds about 300 million gallons). So do yourself, your friends and the world at large a favour-make sure the next home your old or unwanted clothes and shoes go to is a loving one. It will make all the difference.