WC Archive

Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher has a terrific interview up on her site, a conversation with Carlos Salgado and Bart Bettencourt of Scrapile, the New York-based design group that manufactures stylish tables, benches, shelves and lamps out of scrap wood from lumber mills and building companies. Scrapile has now opened up a sustainable building materials company, Bettencourt Green Building Supplies, and is considering expanding into flooring. Jill's interview really gets into what drives Salgado and Bettencourt, and gives welcome insight into the mind of the green designer.

JILL: Were you always interested in environmentalism?

CARLOS: With my own stuff I’ve been involved in environmental concerns for a while now. I was really involved with solar power for a while, and that sort of led me into green building. But I can’t say I was always green. I mean at the time, even when I was interested in building green, a lot of materials just weren’t available, and when they were they were just so expensive it wasn’t feasible.

BART: Philosophically, environmentalism is definitely the most important thing in this for me. When I started learning about furniture design and all the materials that go into it, I just started getting really turned off by the industry standard, what was available, and particularly what was available in New York.

Carlos actually brought some “green” sample materials by the shop one day, and we immediately started researching the field. I sort of plugged him into the furniture that I was making, and we just started making a push to replace the environmentally damaging materials that were being used.

If you don't already read Inhabitat, this is a good place to start. And remember the names Jill Fehrenbacher and Sarah Rich (Inhabitat's two main writers) -- they'll be popping up here again soon...