By Justin Toland, Contributing Editor, PPI magazine, RISI
BRUSSELS,
June 23, 2008 (Viewpoint) -
My attention was drawn earlier this week to a CNN news report about a bicycle made of board. Phil Bridge, a student at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, has designed the prototype of a bike made from Hexacomb, a kraft linerboard-based product manufactured by the company, Pregis. The main components of Bridge’s bicycle – the frame, forks and wheels – are paperboard, and designed to be replaced (for free) every six months. Other key elements – steel wheel rims, crankset and tires – are made of traditional, hardier materials and would have a standard lifetime.
Bridge reckons the total manufacturing cost of the bicycle would be around $30, cheap enough to allow poorer members of society to buy one and also cheap enough to deter potential bicycle thieves. Environmental friendliness is, of course, another advantage of this ingenious invention.
Creative new uses for paper are not limited to the transport sector. Some of our brightest minds have also turned their attention to the home.
Firms such as Sweden’s ReturDesign and the Paris-Based La Compagnie Bleuzen are designing and building cardboard furniture for everyday use. While their products are still firmly in the novelty category, rather than the norm, who’s to say that, 10 years from now, we won’t be sitting on linerboard rather than leather? After all, who, a decade ago, would have predicted the runaway global success of flat-pack self-assembly furniture?
The home is also the focus of an Australian project called ‘The Cardboard House’. Architects Stutchbury and Pape, in collaboration with the Ian Buchan Fell Housing Research Unit at University of Sydney, and using materials supplied by Visy Industries (recycled board and a waterproof roof made from HDPE plastic), have built a low-cost, 100%-recyclable house that is designed to be a genuine temporary housing option (e.g. for emergency housing or while a home is being renovated).
The Cardboard House follows on from the work of Japan’s Shigeru Ban Architects (SBA), which has been using paper tube structures as the basis for housing, civic and temporary buildings since the early 1990s, including, most notably, the Japanese pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany.
Paper wears well
While these cardboard structures aim for some kind of permanence, at the other end of the scale, paper’s strength is its disposability. “Did you hear about the cowboy who wore paper clothes? He was arrested for rustling.” Before it became a bit of a bad joke, disposable paper clothing was for a few years in the 1960s, both a fashionable and lucrative consumer product. By 1967, well-known names such as Kimberly-Clark, Scott and Hallmark were among more than 60 companies producing clothes made of paper, often worn at parties, until growing public concern about ‘throw-away’ goods led to a rapid decline in demand.
While the consumer market died, paper clothing found a niche in the medical sector and among painters and decorators. In hospitals, the battle between paper and cloth patient examination gowns is comfortably being won by paper. So much so that a leading US supplier of cloth gowns, Nixon Uniform Service and Medical Wear, has taken to throwing its weight behind a campaign group called ‘Patients against Paper’, an attempt to convince supplies purchasers that patients prefer cloth gowns!
What all these examples show is the amazing versatility and usefulness of paper, whether at home, at work or on the road. What other material gives designers and inventors so much scope? Let’s see what they come up with next.
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