Finnish design firm Woodio has created a bathroom, the place every part from the seat to the bowl is fashioned from wooden composite that reportedly generates 99 per cent fewer emissions in its manufacturing than ceramics.
Named Block, the wall-mounted rest room was made utilizing a fabric developed by Woodio founder Petro Lahtinen that’s round 80 per cent wooden by quantity, incorporating regionally sourced aspen and offcuts from the Finnish forest business.
These wooden chips have been blended with a mixture of fossil-based polyester and bioplastic resins to create a composite that’s each waterproof and “virtually unbreakable”, the corporate claims.
Its manufacturing course of requires no warmth and a fraction of the water and power wanted to create conventional ceramic or porcelain bogs, Lahtinen informed Dezeen.
“There may be nothing incorrect with ceramic itself,” he mentioned. “It’s the manufacturing strategy of the ceramics that causes the environmental impression.”
“Usually, industrial ceramics are fired at 1,500 levels Celsius for no less than 12 hours and this warmth is produced usually by burning gasoline, which clearly causes appreciable CO2 emissions.”
In whole, Woodio claims its manufacturing course of generates 99 per cent fewer emissions than that used to create conventional ceramic sanitaryware.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t think about any emissions from materials sourcing or disposal, which might have a huge effect on a product’s total footprint.
“The financial savings are notably targeted on the gate-to-gate part,” Lahtinen mentioned.
“Even our merchandise must be transported and disposed on the finish of life, and likewise uncooked materials sourcing must be included.”
Lahtinen initially developed the Woodio composite materials again in 2017 and the corporate has since turned it into every part from bathtubs to clean basins utilizing a patented solid moulding method.
“Mainly now we have developed moulds that may deal with non-fluid uncooked supplies,” Lahtinen mentioned. “It’s a actually progressive technique.”
The Block rest room is the corporate’s most intricate and sophisticated product so far, developed over the course of three years and designed in collaboration with Finnish studio Pentagon Design.
Whereas sawdust and wooden shavings have historically been used to assist break down the waste in off-grid composting bogs, Woodio claims its model is the “world’s first” flush rest room to be comprised of the fabric.
Nevertheless, the wooden composite nonetheless depends on a number of fossil-based assets, together with polyester resin in addition to numerous components and floor therapies, though the corporate is planning to make use of solely bio-based resins as soon as it strikes to an industrial manufacturing unit within the subsequent few years.
The truth that the fabric is a composite may also make the bathroom virtually unattainable to recycle on the finish of its life, which is often round 10 to fifteen years however can go all the best way as much as 50.
Woodio argues the bathroom will be burned for power on the finish of its life to forestall it from ending up in landfill. However this is able to launch each the fossil carbon and the carbon saved within the wooden into the environment.
Earlier efforts to make bogs extra sustainable have targeted largely on decreasing or eliminating their water consumption. To this impact, the Sandi idea rest room makes use of sand and a tiny conveyor belt to eliminate waste whereas a current Samsung prototype as a substitute combusts it into ashes.
