What 'Eco-Friendly' Should Mean

The category has an honesty problem. A bamboo-fibre lunchbox is usually bamboo dust in a melamine binder. A 'plant-based' tote is often cotton with a polyurethane coating that makes the whole thing unrecyclable. A compostable film frequently means industrially compostable in a facility that does not exist in the buyer's country.

We apply four questions to everything before it is listed.

First: what happens at end of life, with no special facility? If the honest answer is landfill, it does not go on the site. Our unlined jute composts. Our areca plates break down in a home heap in about sixty days. Our terracotta returns to the riverbank it came from.

Second: is the material a waste stream or a new harvest? A fallen areca sheath, a jute mill offcut, a coconut shell after copra, an invasive weed. Where we can source from something already discarded, we do.

Third: who made it, and what were they paid? We publish the district, the cluster and the household count for every product family. Piece rates are agreed with the cluster, not imposed, and we pay fifty percent on order rather than on delivery so nobody finances our inventory out of their own pocket.

Fourth: would we still want it if it were not sustainable? This is the one most of the category fails. An object that has to be excused is an object that gets replaced. Everything here has to earn its place on design alone first.