After a week spent talking about flat-pack and pre-fab, it’s only fitting that we dedicate this week’s spotlight on design to another example of the efficient design philosophy. We’re scaling down a bit, though, from entire houses or rooms of furniture, to showcase a slightly smaller, but no less useful, version of flat-pack: it’s ply Design’s [www.plydesign.com] plyFOLD containers.

TreeHugger is always on the lookout for simple, creative solutions to create less waste, use materials more efficiently and incorporate these ideas into our everyday lives. plyFOLD, the handy little tabletop catch-alls from ply Design, are a great example of all three. Made from recycled leather and Climatex Lifecycle Felt (gathered from factory scraps), the containers flatten for wafer-thin packaging & shipping, and are biodegradable (for potential use in your compost pile or bin [www.sundancechannel.com]) at the end of their useful lives.

They’d be a perfect hall table accountrement; a place to drop your keys, change, phone and whatever else you don’t want to lose, but don’t want to carry with you around the house. Though much smaller, and, you might think, less consequential than something like a house, these containers represent an important green idea: that anything, even something as simple as a textile scrap, can have a second life as something useful, and that there is no reason to waste anything. As we, as a society, continue to get smarter about efficiently using materials, products like this will become more commonplace, replacing waste with substance and cutting out the landfill in the life cycle equation; until that happens, we’ll continue to look toward places like ply Design for their outstanding example. It’s the little things that matter, after all.

Created by an architect turned furniture designer, Project Import Export (or PIE) was founded by Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta, who wanted to explore the ultimate concept of “living space” in relation to the complexity of nature. Using many quickly renewable materials like water hyacinth, liana, bamboo and rattan, PIE takes several design cues from nature (sort of an artful form of biomimicry [www.sundancechannel.com]) and uses the materials’ physical properties to his advantage.

PIE’s design philosophy is to make furniture an art form; the collections’ curvaceous profiles and rich textures generate warmth and sensuality. Take the two pieces pictured above, for example; “alpha” (left) takes its obvious inspiration from the alphabet, but combines it with an Asian-inspired minimalism that feels right at home in the contemporary world. “Easy lounge”, on the other hand, tends more toward smooth lines, making it more comfortable before you ever even sit down in it. Both designs are made from bamboo [www.sundancechannel.com].

“Stomach” (pictured above) also has a pretty obvious design inspiration, but what we like best about this one is that the design itself doesn’t belie the materials. Made from rattan — a material usually reserved for frumpy patio furniture and the like — you’d never guess that these chairs used to be long, sinewy reeds. The material is updated and given a fresh, modern (if stomach-inspired) look that not only looks great, but is equally functional to boot.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about PIE is that they don’t subscribe to one specific design philosophy; it’s not all modern, or Asian-inspired, or minimal, but it all uses eco-friendly materials to produce inspiring organic shapes and functional, artful furniture that can blend with many decors. Learn more about them at their website [www.projectimportexport.com]; several of the designs are available from Vivavi [www.vivavi.com] as well. So, how many pieces of PIE do you want?