Naturwall: Disposal plastic cups get second life in vertical gardening system
From eco-minded Turkish design firm Designnobis comes Naturwall, a flat-pack, DIY living wall system that incorporates disposable plastic beverage cups as planters.
Tue, Dec 20 2011 at 10:45 AM EST
Images: Designnobis via Behance
Conceived by Dr. Hakan Gürsu of awarding-winning Turkish eco-design firm Designnobis (the firm prides itself on picking up 44 design awards in only 60 months) Naturwall is a new living wall system that’s been making a splash across the green design blogosphere over the past few days. Strikingly simple stuff but it’s a shame that the concept isn’t in production (yet) as it would make the perfect DIY project for a holiday staycation or when you’re housebound and restless on a cold winter’s day.
Honored with a 2008 Green Dot Build award, Naturwall consists of a modular, fully recyclable aluminum rack system that can hold up to a dozen plants and be hung on a wall or arranged together to form room dividers or other larger installations. The unit can also be modified to accommodate different sizes and types of plants.
The genius of Naturwall is that the planters themselves aren’t included with the rack system as the unit is specifically designed to accommodate disposal plastic coffee and tea cups — or any type of throwaway cup, really — that would otherwise be trashed after their initial use.
Gürsu explains the prototype design:
Ten or more pieces of used plastic cups were collected and put in a very simple flexible metal holder system than it can be placed in different ways to living environment. This carbon free system is simply serving a new sustainable method for creating “vertical green walls” by using the plastic disposables of man-made environment.Within limits of these flexible system potentials; everyone can easily create unlimited variation of vertical green wall applications and used in an eco sensitive manners for improving the environmental quality. And with help of these systems, customers can create more and more green walls and yards to reduce the carbon rates. Also heat prevention will directly improve too.
Love it ... just think about all those ubiquitous red Solo cups leftover from your holiday houseparty gracing one of these bad boys. For more about Naturwall, head on over to Behance. And be sure to check out Gürsu’s “PET-Tree,” an outdoor vertical growing system that incorporates, you guessed it, recycled plastic bottles.
Via [Behance Network] via [TreeHugger]
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