Miniwiz makes iPhone cover from 100% trash
Miniwiz Sustainable Energy Development company has made the news before. First with Taipei's EcoARK pavilion, a nine-story building made of over 1.5 million recycled plastic bottles. The bottles were refashioned into "POLLI-Bricks," a material that won best Product in 2010's Earth Awards.
Miniwiz struck again with the Polli-Boat, in which POLLI-Bricks were used as the main floatation device, and other green material innovations were used to reduce the toxic manufacturing process of regular decking.
The firm creates practical products too, like the miniBISCUIT, a solar and wind powered battery charger, or POLLI-tea, a drink package made to be re-used.
The team, behind Managing Director Arthur Huang, is at it again with The Re-Case, an iPhone cover made out of 100% trash. To be clear, this stylish case is not something you would want to discard.
The cases are made from rice-farming by-products that are reprocessed and added to post-consumer thermo-plastics, forming what Miniwiz calls POLLIBER. The material is highly durable, recyclable and can be manufactured with minimal CO2 emissions.
According to the product description, the design was inspired by the inrō, a Japanese Edo-Period accessory used to carry small objects and often shaped to provide tactile stress relief. The ripple design creates a tactile effect to offset stress and is ergonomic, "allowing the phone to nestle snugly in the user's hand."
The Re-Case has space for a RFID card (radio-frequency identification) used for identifying and tracking your phone. Despite the its eco-friendly material, this may just be the most useful part of the case.
MiniWiz's "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" mantra has created a platform for research and development in many different areas, but it always comes back to design that seeks to find solutions to the world's waste problems that have practical application and that people will actually use.
[Via Treehugger and Miniwiz]
Photo: MINIWIZ
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com