Andrew Simpson, Founder, Vert Design Studio, Sydney

Vert Design is a Sydney-based studio and design house consisted of a dynamic team of designers who combine the experience of a commercial design practice with the innovation of a small production house. Founded in 2005 by Andrew Simpson, the studio operates as a testing ground for new concepts and self-initiated experimentation, as well as offering design concepts, modelling, prototyping and manufacturing to clients, from niche boutique brands to multinational organisations. This approach at the process edge of making has led to innovations and technological advancements, such as the sustainable reuse of materials, all of which inform Vert’s product design output. Vert works across industrial design, strategy and craft including industrial and medical products, glass, ceramics, furniture, lighting, consumer electrics, wearable tech, fashion, jewellery, eye-wear, boats, shelters, and automotive parts.

What made you start Vert Design Studio in 2005?

I studied under Cameron Tonkinwise, an international expert in design studies at UTS, who in turn was influenced by Tony Fry, a world leader and thinker on sustainability and particularly sustainability in design. Cameron took over the EcoDesign Foundation from Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis. He made a very strong impression on me and on a generation where the impact of human involvement on the environment was taught to us from a very young age. The real problems we have are growing inequity and unsustainable behaviours and the impact on the planet, so setting up a design studio that addressed those two concerns was a pretty natural thing - design as a mechanism for solving problems.

Did people understand what you were doing?

We have had an interesting journey in sustainability, which has changed a lot. Historically, if you think about the sustainability protest movement, it was about shifting the goalposts and saying, ‘We want you to stop what you're doing.’ So what we saw in the EcoDesign Foundation was someone might make a beautiful, elegant chair and it's got subtlety and visual beauty, then the critics would say but it's not sustainable. And it was just a way of making them right and other people wrong so they were unassailable, but it didn’t make for good design. We started the studio looking for a way to create viable, sustainable alternatives that were also desirable. I often say sustainable design is first and foremost good design.

When the studio started, we would have mavericks inside organisations, like outliers inside large corporations, who were interested in sustainability but operated as a free agent. Working with them we would get quite good sustainable outcomes, but sometimes we had to do it by stealth. So we would dress something up as efficiency or present it as some other opportunity, but really we were pushing sustainable outcomes. In 2009 with the GFC those outliers were hollowed out of organisations, all the people who were mavericks or a bit different. And I remember sitting down one day and thinking, all the people we work for are no longer in these organisations.

But then a really interesting thing happened around 2014 to 2016, where suddenly we started to see companies were coming to us directly for sustainability, and it was coming from much higher levels within the organisation. Historically, sustainability always meant change and change always introduced risk; the opportunity that came from the sustainable change wasn't worth the risk. The big shift we saw was the risk of inaction started to outweigh the risk of action.

So the risk now is brand reputational damage and their customers finding more sustainable alternatives. Also the generation of my age, who have been brought up with sustainable principles since they were in primary school, are now in positions of power and actively trying to make change.

What about the issue of greenwashing and box ticking?

What a lot of people want is to continue doing what they're already doing, but they want a material that's going to solve the problem. So they say, ‘We fundamentally do something that's unsustainable and uses resources in a linear system for temporary convenience; we want to keep doing that because it’s profitable, but we want some new material that suddenly makes it sustainable.’ That's where most greenwashing comes from, people trying to do small c change instead of big C. You really need to go into it root and branch from the bottom up to develop more sustainable systems.

You can’t do as much when you're doing it by stealth or via outliers. When it comes from a board level directive, it's much more possible, but it created a real issue for us. We had been doing small sustainability projects but suddenly people were coming to us directly asking for much bigger solutions. It meant we really had to shift gears. It's no longer appropriate to offer a little bit of change, because then we let them off the hook. They can go, ‘Oh, we saw the sustainable design people and they said this was fine.’

So it becomes our job to push them a little bit further, which has been a difficult thing because how much risk do we take on someone else's behalf and how do we bring them along with us? It has been a fascinating challenge.

Are there many other places now like you who are offering this sort of thing?

Really not, quite sadly. You get stuck in a little bubble, like an echo chamber, and I assume everybody's doing it, then occasionally I'll stick my head up and go, oh, there's nobody. I meet with other design studios and they're still so in love with gizmos and gadgets, they really still have this belief that tech will save us. It's a bit disheartening.

Is the biggest challenge trying to think of realistic alternatives to 21st Century capitalism?

I've been doing sustainable design for coming up to 20 years, and we've not got much we can point at and say, look at that great shining example. It's a lot of small steps and progress and developing something and letting other people champion it and trudging along with it. But the thing I've noticed is, maybe less so in the last four years, but we used to see all the time people who cared most about sustainability often produced the least sustainable outcomes. And when I dug down into it, I saw that it was people that rightly identified that capitalism was the problem, so they said can we develop a sustainable project and reject capitalism at the same time? And you end up with vases made of drinking straws or stuff that's really on a small, craft level so the net impact is nothing. It just encourages consumerism; you diverted a kilo of plastic and use a kilowatt of energy to produce something.

Alternately, I see some companies who could not care less about sustainability, who have massive sustainable impacts. We have a company that we produce a ground stabilisation matting for, and they would be diverting 100,000 tonnes of recycled material a year into an adaptive reuse product, which then reduces the need for asphalt. But they could not care less about the environment, they're doing it because it's cost effective and efficient, and some of their customers want it.

How have issues around sustainability changed since you started?

One of our core principles is sustainability as an aspiration, not destination, and the reason for that is things always need to change. For instance, I helped set up Biopac. We worked with them back in 2009 when they were just starting. At that time we were replacing Styrofoam food containers - remember when your hamburger came in a little Styrofoam box? We replaced that with sugarcane mulch, and it was a really good sustainable initiative. But now Biopac produce over 350 million takeaway food containers sold in Australia every year. And you go, well, at that volume, how do we think about the sustainability of it and what happens to it within waste systems?

So it needs another round of intervention and development, it becomes more about reusing instead of single use. You keep pushing for sustainability and acknowledging change, and in that way you also avoid greenwashing because that happens if people claim a green tick because they've solved this problem. We say we'll probably never solve it, but let's keep pushing it in the right direction.

Anything particularly interesting you're working now?

We're about to launch a new product for ZeroCo, and that's a great one in terms of progress. Round one of development was about pouches and refilling and washing and not throwing anything away, then round two was about using non-petrochemical material. So we're using paper and we've got a high-value reusable canister and very low-intensity refillable systems, that's coming to market soon. We can't publicly talk about the outcomes until it's launched, but that's a very good one, and the organisation is also actively out there using these sales to fund clean-up operations in a very meaningful way.

I've also worked with Country Road for a number of years including with Nila Rezaei and her Crafted Liberation project [showing at ADC later in the year]. That was about managing fabric waste and creating adaptive reuse, experimenting with different materials, making an intermediate design and using the outcomes of that to develop a finished product.

That project uses contaminated co-mingled recycled materials, which is the problem with a lot of recycling systems. Using compression moulding for the cores then covering them with the fabric removes one of the sustainability problems. It's really revolutionary on many levels.

What have you done in the past 20 years that has been most satisfying?

It's not so visible, but the work we did in marine plastics. It is very commonplace now but back in 2010 when we started doing it, everyone said it can't be done. We were the first people to prove that you could have really good outcomes reusing marine plastics, and we facilitated and accelerated a lot of the collection activity. We brought to market four or five products that became the precedent and reduced risk for marine plastics use, then that allowed other people to do it in a more mass-market way. But it was that initial work that broke fresh ground and allowed other things to follow. And I'm pretty proud about that.

Also a lot of the adaptive reuse work, creating a mental framework of how to create value for reclaimed or recycled materials. We've pioneered maintaining the provenance of materials: Where did you collect it from? What was its previous life? Then using that provenance to develop products that have a cognitive benefit to the end user. As an example, we've just made shovel handles out of hard hats. Hard hats are seen as a strong, manly industrial product, and then becoming a shovel handle lends that association to the product. So it's now going to be a strong, manly industrial shovel handle.

What are you working on now?

A couple of years ago I sat down and said what are the major environmental problems facing Australia? One I identified was invasive species control; cats, cane toads and foxes are the leading cause of extinction, as well as land clearing. There's been no design intervention at all so I've been spending the past couple of years actively working with Indigenous rangers and conservation groups to develop systems for feral pest eradication. And that's something where you're getting some really good gains in at the moment.