Rush Pleansuk, Thai design director at Plato Furniture has created a range of eco-chic furniture with its contract in Lampang Province to promote the use of renewable forests to its customers in Sweden and Singapore.
It takes more than 40 years for teak and ebony trees to grow to a size that’s useable but “replaceable forests” take just 25 years, according to Rush. Nevertheless, managing raw materials is a challenge.
Fabric designer Jarupatcha Achavasmit is responsible for the Royal Weave brand of interestingly textured carpets. The carpets are made from 100-per-cent hand-woven wool from New Zealand sourced from the off-cuts of carpet company Tai Ping.
“The philosophy is not to sell them as recycled, even though they are. It takes careful planning and design,” say Jarupatcha, a PhD student in social sustainability at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Selling well both here and abroad, the carpets are typical of Thailand’s small but growing number of recycling success stories.
A group of four young minds from the non-profit Volunteer Spirit project due to its worries about the staggering volume of paper wasted in universities devised a way to produce recycled-paper notebooks under a project called “Paper Ranger”.
Early in the year 2007, it collected paper thrown away after being written on one side and made notebooks utilizing the blank sides. “The project is an easy alternative in the battle to save the world and its forests,” explains Napa Thamsongsana, assistant art director of Volunteer Spirit.
Chaiyaporn Intuvisarnkul of Pabpim Publishing bound the first batch of 400 notebooks. “Making the reused-paper notebooks is a lot more labour intensive than producing normal ones and that means they are more expensive. But, I believe if more and more people are eco-conscious, costs will fall,” Chaiyaporn says.
Of 209 countries, Thailand ranks 22nd in carbon-dioxide emissions, according to “Loke Ron: Took Sing Ti Rao Tham Plean Plang Lok Samuer”, (“Global Warming: Everything We Do Can Change the World”), by Thitinant Sristhita. The US, obviously, is No 1, followed by China, Russia, India and Japan.
A comparison of Southeast Asian countries has Thailand as the second biggest polluter after Indonesia.
