OBSERVED
industrial design
sustainability
Granny Smith
“In today’s marketplace...everything
has rubber over the top. We call it
the Good Grips effect.”
For Evo Design, setting out to dev elop sustainable kitchen products meant completely
rethinking the genre. “In today’s marketplace
for kitchen goods, everything has rubber
over the top. We call it the Good Grips effect,”
says Aaron Szymanski, president of the
industrial-design firm, based in Watertown,
Connecticut. “There are two or three different
plastics involved, and you’ve got rubber over
Cooking with plastic. But you can’t do that if you want to
be able to throw it into a recycling bucket at
the end of its use cycle.”
Evo recently completed its first line of
Leftovers kitchen accessories for Recycline, a company
based in Waltham, Massachusetts, that manufactures consumer goods from 100 percent
recycled plastic. Called Preserve, the line
includes cutting boards, colanders, and food-storage containers with some innovative details. For the cutting boards, sticking with one
kind of plastic meant doing away with the
usual nonslip rubber feet and adhesive.
However, Evo still wanted to prevent the
board from sliding. The team eventually
figured out that a curved lip could help the
product get a grip on the countertop; if you
flip it upside down, that same curve becomes
a handle.
The business partnership also required
a new way of thinking for Evo, which is typically hired by heavyweights like Nike,
Hasbro, and Schick. “One of the designers
had seen a Stonyfield Farm yogurt cup that
mentioned Recycline,” Szymanski explains.
“We had been looking at the products we
work on and wanted to work with a company
that truly focused on sustainability.” Evo
Made from recycled polypropylene, pitched Recycline at a fortuitous time—the
Preserve food containers are rugged latter happened to be looking for a design
enough to withstand dishwasher
temperatures and can be recycled
again at the end of their lifespan.
Evo Design’s new kitchenware line
is made from recycled plastic.
partner. “It was a fantastic marriage,” Recycline president Eric Hudson says, “in the
sense that our budding Preserve brand was in
need of a close design partner that would
enable us to launch new products.” But the
young company didn’t have the budget for
design that Evo usually gets, so the studio
agreed to work purely for royalties. “We tried
to figure out how many hours we could risk in
terms of speculative work,” Szymanski says.
“It’s really the first time we’ve done that with
a client. By now we have close to four thousand hours in this project.”
The shapes of the products are inspired by
nature: the cutting board resembles a blade
of grass bending in the wind, the colander is
vaguely reminiscent of a strawberry, and the
food-storage containers are a tribute to Granny
Smith apples. The designers also chose vibrant
colors to prove that recycled goods need
not look earthy, and specified highly polished
surfaces wherever the products make contact
with food. “It was our responsibility to create
forms that looked credible, safe, and clean,”
Szymanski says.
The line recently made its debut in Whole
Foods Markets across the country through
Recycline’s existing distribution network.
The principled retail chain seems like a natural outlet for Preserve. “We believe that when
a consumer goes to the shelf and is able to
choose a beautifully designed product with alternative materials that is made in the USA,”
Hudson says, “they’ll do it.” — Tim McKeough T
