Eco-friendly light bulb wins design award

Reporter: Now here is a bright idea - a designer, low-energy light bulb. So now, if you want to illuminate your home in an eco-friendly fashion, you have this curvaceous choice. The designers spent a great deal of time worrying about what might turn people on, and what might turn them off. Their quest was to marry practicality, something that actually works, with a sense of style and beauty, to create an object of desire. Something that you not only wanted to own, but hopefully also wanted to keep.

Nicolas Roope: And that's really the role of the designer, I think, is to make objects that people really connect with and really cherish, you know. I think that's one of our roles, and obviously in this case this isn't just about prettifying. This is about, you know, obviously, the underlying problem of getting people to adopt this stuff, because obviously that's in everybody's interests. Reporter: That is if money is not too much of an issue - funky costs. Each one is nearly £20. That's up to twenty times the price of some other low-energy bulbs.

It's too early to judge if this product has a dazzling future, but its creators will be reassured to know that at least one major household goods retailer said its customers did not consider light bulbs dull. In fact, to them, design matters.

Unit 20 MANUFACTURING

Chopsticks for China, Made in America

Some Asian countries use chopsticks to eat food. They’re often made of wood or sometimes plastic. China makes most of the world’s chopsticks. Several hundred Chinese companies make about 63 billion pairs of chopsticks a year. Those companies need more wood.

Areas in China and Japan have run out of wood, but the American State of Georgia has a lot of wood. Georgia’s wood has a nice color. Companies have to use chemicals or bleach to lighten much of the Asian wood. The wood in Georgia is already light.

One small company in the American city of Americus, Georgia, has the solution to the shortage of wood for chopsticks. The company is called Georgia Chopsticks.

They started making chopsticks for export to China. Jae Lee, the president of Georgia Chopsticks, is Korean American. He says that the world market for chopsticks is huge. It costs Jae Lee less than one cent to make a pair of chopsticks.

“Right now, we’re making about two million pairs of chopsticks per day. But we are increasing. End of this month, we’ll have seven machines coming in. So it’ll increase to four million per day. End of this year, we’ll produce ten million per day.”

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21