Couper Croiser is a design studio founded in 2006 by industrial designers François Palmer and Jean-François Rousseau. After realising that landfill sites and Écocentres actually contained a fair amount of new material, the two environmentally-aware entrepreneurs launched the company, whose mission is to take some of this material – namely, new carpet and rug remnants disposed of by manufacturers – and create something of value.

Carpet manufacturers generate hundreds of tons of leftovers each year, which in Québec account for 7% of all waste found in landfills. Palmer and Rousseau therefore decided to collect new carpet remnants from a major manufacturer in the province and use them to make “value-added” carpets and rugs. In doing so, the two designers adopted an “eco-design” approach.

Eco-design
The underlying notion behind eco-design is the incorporation of environmental concerns into the design of a service, good or manufacturing process. This approach retains traditional design criteria (e.g., quality, longevity, functionality, ergonomics, safety, etc.) and meets standard requirements regarding regulations, brand image, and so forth. However, eco-design also takes into account the potentially negative effects that a given product may have on the environment (e.g., resource consumption, air pollution, waste production, etc.). The design stage – i.e., before production has even begun – provides the best opportunity to lower costs and improve a product’s environmental profile. Proper lifecycle management (from the extraction of raw materials to the end of a product’s usefulness) will lead to better overall environmental performance. There is also an international standard that favours this kind of design: ISO 14062, “Environmental management: Integrating environmental aspects into product design and development.”