5 d. ago London's US$6.3 Billion 'Super Sewer' Completes Bringing In A New Era For Waste Management & River Health

London's US$6.3 Billion 'Super Sewer' Completes Bringing In A New Era For Waste Management & River Health  Yanko Design

Economics

6 d. ago From landfill to London Fashion Week: Meet E.L.V. Denim, the brand that wants your old jeans

Zero waste, made for women’s bodies, and designed to be worn for life: E.L.V. Denim is on a mission to make the best jeans in the world. Claudia Cockerell meets the founder

Politics

8 d. ago ‘Bark is the original dampproof membrane!’ Meet the radical designers who let nothing go to waste

As their experimental structures made out of cactus plaster, tree resin and chopped straw appear in the real world, eco research studio Material Cultures explains why nature has all the best building materials“It’s like nose-to-tail eating, but for trees,” says Paloma Gormley, co-founder of the ecological design studio Material Cultures. “Industrial timber production is so wasteful. We should be making the most of every element of the tree, from its bark to the natural glue-like lignins and rosins – it all has value.”The organisation’s philosophy is currently on display at London’s V&A in a show called Material Cultures: Woodland Goods. A hairy brown wall hangs in the museum’s furniture gallery, alongside some unusual plywood stools whose seats have been exchanged for slabs of compressed bark. Nearby are sheet materials made from pine needles and sap, papery silver birch bark encrusted with dried moss, and other experiments with things gathered from the forest. It’s quite a cont...

Politics

1 week ago ‘Something to be proud of’: how an Irish town got a sewage makeover – and stopped discharging its waste into the sea

Arklow’s sleek new wastewater treatment plant is a collaborative triumph between engineers, contractors and architects Clancy Moore. And it’s amazingly unsmelly “Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore. Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal.The project is in illustrious company. The tra...

Politics

1 week ago ‘Cathedral of crap’: is this the world’s most beautiful sewage treatment plant?

Its lab buildings have a rusticated air while its sleek, paper-thin louvre windows are reminiscent of a luxury ocean-liner. More importantly, the people of Arklow in Ireland can finally go swimming without fear of floatersIt is not often that the arts section of a newspaper finds itself concerned with the aesthetic merits of a sewage works. But then there are few facilities designed with the finesse of the new €139m (£117m) wastewater treatment plant in Arklow, which stands like a pair of minty green pagodas on the edge of the Irish Sea. Nor are there many architectural firms who have thought so deeply about the poetics of effluent as Clancy Moore.“There’s a wonderful passage in Ulysses,” says practice co-founder, Andrew Clancy, summoning James Joyce as we tiptoe along a metal gantry above a gigantic vat of bubbling brown sludge. “The narrator turns on the tap to fill a kettle, sparking a lengthy rumination on where the water comes from, how it flows from reservoirs, through aqueduc...

Economics

2 w. ago Australia election 2025 live: Dutton hints at cuts to ABC if he finds ‘waste’; Coalition to designate gas a ‘critical mineral’

Coalition senator Susan McDonald told a gas industry conference in Sydney the Coalition government’s plan if elected. Follow today’s news liveAnywhere but Canberra: Australian voters on what matters to themInteractive guide to electorates in the Australian electionListen to the first episode of our new narrative podcast series: GinaSee all our Australian election 2025 coverageGet our afternoon election email, free app or daily news podcastForeign minister Penny Wong has told RN Breakfast says Labor is “realistic” on what outcomes the government could achieve on tariffs with the Trump administration.We’ll keep working hard for the best outcome, but I think all of us are realistic. As the prime minister made it clear yesterday, we are not willing to trade away the things that make Australia the best country in the world, like our healthcare system. We don’t want the Americanisation of our healthcare system. We won’t be weakening our biosecurity laws, and we won’t be trading away our P...

Politics