The good folks over at Treehugger have teamed up with I.D. magazine to create an innovative two-fold design competition called Umbrella Inside Out, subtitled: An Umbrella with a Future (that’d be competition no. 1) and Design with a Past (you guessed it: no. 2).
As you may have noticed, umbrellas don’t tend to last very long. Millions of them end up in landfills (some 33 million are sold every year). The first competition is for an umbrella design that meets the new standards of a “cradle to cradle” (C2C) product lifecycle, which basically means something that can naturally decompose, or something that can be “upcycled” into something else useful (you can read more about C2C here). The second contest is to find creative uses for the umbrella trash we’re already stuck with. Personally, I vote for more of these mini-skirts made out of umbrella vinyl. That seems like a perfectly fine and noble way of breathing new life into dead Totes.