WWF spoke to design agency Digital Eskimo about sustainability and design.

Transcript

A part of the idea of Digital Eskimo is that we would walk the talk as well as working on sustainable projects that we’re passionate about for our clients, but we also wanted to create a studio that was in keeping with that philosophy.

So to do that, we’ve created a range of initiatives, from the natural light that was part of the selection of this particular studio space, through to natural paints in the studio, the choice of organic foods and the fact that we don’t have air-conditioning, are all aspects of making it a pleasurable place to be.

One part of the furniture that we’re particularly happy with are our bamboo desks. We designed and cut them ourselves, finished them in a natural wood oil and beeswax, and that means they’re very good on the skin, and don’t give off any bad chemicals.

It’s amazing what you can find at your local market, these Ansett airline trolleys were actually procured from some guys that bought a whole heap of them off the airline after they folded. So we purchased them and had them painted up white to suit our style, and every Eskimo has one on their desk.

The Eskimos all sit on Hermann Miller Mirra chairs, they’re very, very ergonomic, and extremely eco-friendly. They’re 96% recyclable, and made from 76% recycled materials.

In our kitchen we’ve got lots of interesting things going on. We’ve used gourds for storing our tea. They’re from The Gourd Father, believe it or not, in Queensland.

Continuing the bamboo theme, we have a bamboo chopping board, and just like the rest of the bamboo in the studio, it’s environmentally friendly.

Well over here’s the Digital Eskimo worm farm. We put our food scraps into the worm farm, and they turn that into lovely soil, and worm juice, which we bottle and label and give to our clients and staff.

This is the world’s most eco-friendly fridge from Vestfrost. We chose it because of it’s a high-energy rating, and it’s a lovely look.

A studio’s just like a sharehouse, you have to have a dishwasher or there’s going to be fighting. So recently we decided to get one, and we did some research, and decided to choose this very small Fisher and Paykel Dish Drawer, because it’s actually well-matched to our needs, it does small loads very efficiently in terms of the water use and the electricity use.

Okay, here we’ve got your regular recycling system, and we’ve separated some nice polypropylene recyclable recycling bins, and on top is the Bokashi wood chips which have micro-organisms in them. We’ve got a Bokashi bin normally, but one of the Eskimos has taken that home to put on their garden. But when the worms are slacking off, we put our food scraps into the Bokashi instead of the rubbish bin.

As a design agency, we use a lot of electricity, so we’ve switched to GreenPower to make sure that the electricity that we do get is from renewable sources. We also fly interstate to clients, and we’ve opted to neutralise the emissions that we’re putting out through the flights, through Climate Friendly [Editor’s note: Climate Friendly is a client of Digital Eskimo], which does carbon offsetting to balance out the impact of your flights.

Getting your staff around is a big issue for companies in terms of the sustainability of transport and mobility and cars. We’ve opted for a system that’s based on a pushbike fleet and a car share service.

So we’ll ride the bike to the car, and then you simply sit down, lock that in place, drop the handlebars like so, and then fold the whole bike in half and throw that into the car. [Editor’s note: More about Digital Eskimo’s mobility solution]

What are the challenges of living sustainably?

Well one of the biggest challenges is simply finding green products and services in particular. We spend a lot of time researching any particular product; we need to spend a significant amount of time and money looking for the best solutions, and often the information’s not available; it’s difficult to know exactly what the right choices are depending on a lot of factors, so that’s always been very difficult.

What’s exciting is more recently, there are a range of new websites, blogs and so forth that are helping people and companies find more sustainable products, one is Green Pages Australia, the Future is man made site is also bound to have a lot of good ideas around these kind of green products and services.

And I’m looking, as an agency to really inspire other small businesses to come on board and get the benefits of moving to a sustainable model.

WWF would like to thank all the staff at Digital Eskimo.