Students are now able to register for Sustainable Furniture, a new class offered in the College of Design.

Chris Martin, associate professor in art and design, will be teaching the class.

Sustainable Furniture is open to all students and meets every Tuesday and Thursday to share perspectives about sustainability through the production of typical appliances.

The main idea was to move toward addressing sustainability issues though furniture and design, Martin said.

“With sustainable design, let’s say you do build something out of sustainable materials, you build a table out of sustainable materials and that table lasts for six months. Is that sustainable, even if it’s built out of sustainable materials?” Martin said.

Sustainability has several definitions, said Dan Neubauer, senior in integrated studio arts.

“I took the definition as something that could hold up on its own or hold itself up over time, something that is timeless,” Neubauer said. “Say you design a chair, you want that chair not to only be economical to produce but also to withstand the test of time.

“Are people still going to enjoy this 20, 30 years from now; and is it actually going to hold up 20, 30 years from now; or is it going to fall apart when someone sits on it the fifth year after its been made?”

Aside from the sustainability of the design, the choice of materials and longevity of the design are all focuses Martin stresses on his students.

Currently the class hasn’t constructed any furniture. Martin had his students develop an understanding for what sustainability means to them. The class has already taken trips to the Ames Resource Recovery Center to understand what happens to the garbage in Ames.

At Walmart, the class had a chance to learn how various products are packaged, the material choices for typical appliances and how items are being designed now, Martin said.

“You had to think about why towels are wrapped twice in plastic. They’re in one plastic bag but they’re in another one or why bedspreads are wrapped in two layers of plastic when not even one layer is necessary because the first thing you do when you get a bedspread is wash it,” Neubauer said.

One of the first projects will be repurposing the old office furniture from the design building that either gets thrown away or sent to the resource center, Martin said.

“The college had old, broken furniture they set aside … in hopes that someone will do something with it,” Neubauer said. “We each have to take two of the chairs that were down there in a group — a group of three or four — and repurpose them. So whether that’s just stripping the old paint off, brushing off the rust and reupholstering the chair or finding a whole new use for the chair, whether it’s turning it into a table or a sculpture for art.”

Recently Martin had his students purchase a used appliance from Goodwill to disassemble it to see what goes into the appliance, what the materials are and what goes into the material.

“We got into groups and each group took apart an appliance down to its bare bones of material, then we sorted the inventory of the material and researched where that material came from, the kind of process of how it gets from A to B to C to finally D and into the appliance and also realizing how difficult it is to tear apart an appliance like that,” said Curtis Engelhardt, graduate in architecture. “They’re not that easy to recycle because they’re manufactured for production, not so much for recycling.”

Martin said that if there’s a steel part, students have to tell him that the steel is made of iron ore and then the alloy that goes with that.

“They will have to tell me what those alloys are and how those materials are extracted from the earth. Students need to know where everything comes from, then they need to tell me if it’s recyclable,” Martin said.

Further into the semester, after the class finishes repurposing the old office furniture, Martin plans to have his students work with the Biopolymers and Biocomposites Research Team, a group that advocates bioplastics.

Martin plans to have some repurposed furniture sent to the Biopolymers and Biocomposites Research Team to be displayed at their trade shows.

A speaker from the German language program came to speak to the class Tuesday about peoples’ concept of stewardship toward the earth before, during and after the industrial revolution.

“The students will get an idea of the history of sustainability and the history of the idea of conservation,” Martin said.

If his class is deemed successful, Martin will consider teaching the class again the spring 2012.

“I would be very open to teaching it every semester, but right now it’s once a year,” Martin said.

The class is encouraged for students of every major and by teaching this class, Martin wants students to get out of their comfort zone.

“I think it’s a class that at the time there’s a lot of interest in,” Neubauer said. “So far it’s doing a good job of teaching people what sustainability is and how you can go about certain ways of designing sustainably or even just opening your eyes and seeing the potential that you have around you.”

If the course continues to be a part of ISU’s curriculum, Martin hopes to start a course that addresses sustainable development.

“My idea right now is to take students to Ghana in the summer of 2012 and have them work on service projects,” Martin said.