Even those deluded celebs don’t seem as daft as the 265 ton “iceberg” built by Chanel as the set for a recent fashion show in Paris. Made from ice and snow imported from Sweden, it was “recycled” afterward by being returned there in yet another gas-guzzling journey. Presumably it was meant to make me crave a new Chanel bag, but all I could think of were those heartbreaking photographs of polar bears marooned on melting ice caps.
Kermit was correct, being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”
This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
If you look at the history of green, it has always been troublesome. Revered in Islamic culture for evoking the greenery of paradise, it has played an accident-prone role in Western art history. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century Romanticism, artists struggled over the centuries to mix precise shades of green paint, and to reproduce them accurately.
Even if they succeeded, the results often faded or discolored, as did green dyes. When the 19th-century British designer William Morris created wallpapers inspired by medieval tapestries, he copied the blue hues in the originals. But most of those “blues” were really greens, which had changed color over the years.
Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular 18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints, Scheele’s Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.
This noxious heritage should have been forgotten after green’s reinvention as a symbol of ecological purity by environmental protesters in the early 1970s.
It was a perfect choice as their emblem. One reason is, of course, that green is the color of nature. Another is that its natural associations had made it unpopular with the Modern Movement. This enhanced its appeal to early environmentalists, who rejected Modernism as soulless and destructive.
They were also attracted to the maverick qualities that had bedeviled green in the past. Even today, despite all of the advances in color technology, producing green dyes and pigments is still problematic. “Getting the right tones of artificial green is always difficult, and there’s often something disturbing about the result,” said the Dutch product designer Hella Jongerius. “Whereas all shades of green look beautiful in natureFrom : http://twitter.com/SaveTheWaves
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