Clothes hangers are clogging our landfills at a rate of nearly 8 billion per year. We’ve recently brought you designers who have been developing brilliant ways to tackle the problem through eco-friendly materials and innovative new designs. Now industrial designers Alex Witko and Courtney Hunt at Organelle Design have hit upon another great idea — Hangeliers, wonderful chandeliers made from off-the-shelf plastic and wood hangers.
As many Inhabitat readers already know, re-purposing objects, recycled and/or found, can be a tricky business. It takes time, a good eye and not a little bit of luck. With Hangeliers, Organelle Design got it right. Organelle uses re-purposed off-the-shelf hangers, which removes them [if only temporarily] from the landfill cycle. Hangeliers are unique, beautiful and draw attention to the issue of landfill waste at the same time.
Not to be confused with ‘The Langoliers’ [the notoriously awful TV movie based on Stephen King's novella] Organelle’s Hangeliers are reminiscent of modern masters such as Nelson and Henningson—elegant design, precise thinking and a subtle nostalgia. With their commitment to innovation, sustainability and high design, Organelle is certainly a shop to watch.
How the hell does this reflect a “…commitment to innovation, sustainability and high design…”? This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever seen branded as green. There is no way the designers collected clotheshangers from the trash to build these lamps – as the article itself states, they’re simply an off the shelf product. So where do they get off that building with them is environmentally friendly? How is this any different than buying fresh timber and then building lamps out of it? If anything, it’s worse to do it this way – instead of sourcing sustainably harvested wood to build a new lamp, these lamps are made out of clotheshangers that were almost certainly made with no concern for sustainability, cradle-to-cradle design, or anything like that. Garbage like this makes me so mad, and the fact that it regularly pollutes Inhabitat really gets to me. There are plenty of great projects in the world that deserve attention, and you guys (Inhabitat) do a pretty good job of covering a lot of them. Why stoop to this crap? Grrrr…