Tickets Designed by Nature

My good friend Monika is currently traveling through southern New Zealand and she took a little trip to Ulva Island off the southern tip. In her travel blog, she posted this picture of the ticket she received for her water taxi trip. That’s right, it’s a leaf. And also a perfect example of eco-design.

Why a leaf? Turns out that the extremely humid conditions on Ulva Island make paper a less than ideal substance since it absords too much moisture. This particular species of leaf, however, has a paper-like texture so that it can be written on, and retains it's strength in the moist air. Plus, if one of these suckers blows away in the often-stormy wind, the environmental cost is negligable.

It just seems like the perfect example of eco-design. The tourists are enchanted by the unique ticket, the printing is the cost of a marker, and the environment is left undisturbed.

As the writers of Cradle to Cradle point out, it should be the objective of every designer to create products that are either techinical or biological nutrients – that can either be remanufactured into high quality goods, or can be left on the ground to feed back into the Earth's cycle. I wonder if the owner of this ferry knows that she just achieved something that is the envy of green designers everywhere?