Whether your desk was made from the wing of a B-25 bomber or your carpet once touched the lips of hundreds as plastic bottles, eco-friendly design these days is anything but dull. The trend for reusing, restoring and reincarnating things to keep them out of landfills has given designers a playing field limited only by the imagination - and design fans the chance to hone their creative urges.
The 'found object' approach emerged in art towards the beginning of the last century, but came later in design, where only lately has it served a loftier purpose.
At the London Design Festival a few years ago a show called Trash Luxe claimed to be about finding beauty in unexpected, often dark, dank places, but even so, many of its exhibits had a wholesome aura.
This was where the Campana Brothers introduced work from their alliance with Design with Conscience, which pairs grass-roots artisans with top designers. Their TransNeomatic bowl seats married abandoned scooter tyres from Vietnam with woven wicker.
Stuart Haygarth and Paul Cocksedge wowed design buffs with chandeliers made out of plastic sea flotsam and polystyrene cups respectively. The message was that high design could look good and help clean up the planet.
The half bathtub in Breakfast at Tiffany's may well be the coolest sofa in cinematic history, but it needed Britain's Reestore team to give the idea green-cred. Like Max, their bathtub chaise, or Silvana, a best-selling coffee table made from the innards of washing machines, Reestore's contemporary eco-products have either recycling capabilities or were rescued from a less noble fate in a rubbish dump.