recycled fabrics key to sustainable fashion

The innovative design work of goodone, an ethical fashion business based in Tudor Road, Hackney which uses only recycled fabrics, features in a recent online report by Clare Davidson for the BBC.

Goodone - which supplies retail outlets in London, Manchester, Brighton and Glasgow along with customers in Europe and Japan - is run by Nin Castle and Phoebe Emerson.

The company "mass produces the one-off" by creating individual garments from a unique combination of hand selected recycled fabrics.

The company won a £15,000 Trevor Campbell award for enterprise in 2007. A more recent grant of £16,000 from the London Development Agency has enabled goodone to provide advice and guidance to students and other companies on how the fashion industry can become sustainable.

"We enjoy instigating positive change in the industry," they say.

hackney's house of straw is sign of buildings to come

Plastered bales of straw are the main material for an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm, an education and training facility completed by Amazonails in December. The building points the way forward for companies and clients looking for sustainable and less environmentally damaging forms of construction over the years ahead.

The materials for a house built with straw bales cost about the same as those needed for a conventional timber-frame house, but significantly less than brick and block. A family-sized strawbale house in the UK would cost about £60,000 plus the price of the land. The UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 homes a year.

Strawbale buildings are not the fire risk you might imagine. They have been subjected to rigorous testing by Amazonails, who say that the bales resist burning for the same reason it is difficult to burn a telephone directory. It is easy to set fire to one page, but not to a dense block of paper. When plastered, strawbale walls have an even greater resistance to fire.

Design consultant Barbara Jones, the director of Amazonails, recently supervised the construction of the largest strawbale building in the UK, the new offices and auction room of fine art auctioneers G E Sworder and Sons of Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex, which will open in May. The building was constructed using a new technique called ‘compressive framing’ in which the roof is supported on a timber frame while the strawbale walls are constructed. It is then lowered onto the strawbales, which become the loadbearing structure. The roof then protects the strawbale walls from the weather while they are being plastered.

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.