It’s hard to pick one thing to talk about – MIO company is serious about sustainability and is loaded with completely recycled, environmentally friendly, affordable and GREAT LOOKING unique items for your cool home space. They even make it possible to customize your own furniture with your own artwork or suggestions from them! But beyond the easy to use and informative website of awesome stuff you don’t have to feel bad about buying, the Salm Brothers — who are the designers behind it all — have a larger goal worth supporting: they want to “drive the cultural shift necessary to align consumer desires with what is good for the environment.” They’re employing innovative business and design ideas to improve a very important social issue (consumer choices that are bad for people or the planet). Basically, they’re making it absurdly easy and desirable (and FUN!) to really go green.
For example, they identified an opportunity within an existing recycling infrastructure to create new products from AND sell the material (more info below) for cool DIY projects. So they’re being smart and practical by choosing to build on a good thing that can be taken much further. And this business experiment serves as a great model for other creative entrepreneurs so the social benefits just keep expanding. And I love that they are inspiring/enabling creativity at the same time with this project!
It’s called Loop By the Yard, and it’s a reversible material made from Tyvek®, which has been actively collected and recycled for decades. Apparently, Loop By the Yard can be “cut, sewn, wrinkled, folded, pierced, hung or hemmed like a textile. It is durable, breathable and waterproof, making it ideal for a variety of indoor and outdoor projects.” MIO offers a jacket in three different colors that they’ve made from it.
