The most hopeful buildings, objects and machines of this decade share a strange family resemblance.
They are grown from mushrooms and seaweed, printed from mud, sailed across oceans on rigid wings, powered by sand and sunlight, and designed from the first sketch to be repaired rather than replaced.
Very few of them look like sacrifice. Most of them are simply more beautiful than what they replace.
This is our field guide to where sustainable design stands right now, in September 2026: 25 projects that are real, built or shipping, and worth knowing. It is also the opening chapter of our new guide, Sustainable Design, which gathers sixty more from our archive, going back to 2009.
Sustainable design at a glance
- What it is: designing buildings, objects and systems to use less, last longer and return to the earth or the economy when they are done
- Biggest lever: buildings and construction, about 37% of global CO₂ emissions
- Fastest growing materials: mycelium, seaweed, engineered timber and raw earth
- Tallest timber tower: Atlassian Central in Sydney, 180 m, topped out July 2026
- Newest law: the EU Right to Repair Directive, due in national law by July 31, 2026
37%
of global CO₂ emissions come from buildings and construction
9%
of the world’s plastic waste is recycled
62 Mt
of e-waste in a single year, less than a quarter of it recycled
6.9%
of the materials entering the global economy are recycled ones
Sources: UNEP Global Status Report 2025/26, OECD Global Plastics Outlook (2019 data), Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (2022 data), Circularity Gap Report 2025.
- 01Grown, Not Made
- 02Waste Into Material
- 03Building That Grows Back
- 04Energy, Made Beautiful
- 05Repairing the Water
- 06Objects Built to Last
- 07Cities That Breathe
- 08Borrowed From Nature
Chapter 01
Grown, Not Made
The quiet revolution in materials is biological. Instead of mining, melting and molding, a new generation of designers feeds living things and harvests what they make. The results are warm, strange and often compostable.
01 Mycelium, grown into leather and lampshades
Mycelium is the threadlike root system of fungi, and fed on farm waste it knits itself into solid form in days. Ecovative has spent years growing it into packaging and foam. MycoWorks went after luxury, growing a mycelium “leather” called Reishi for fashion houses. The industry is still finding its footing: in 2025 MycoWorks closed its South Carolina plant and now finishes mycelium grown by partners using its own tanning process.
18 MPa. That process lifted the tensile strength of its mycelium sheets from about 4 MPa to 18, closer to the real thing.
02 A pavilion grown in a workshop
At Chelsea in 2025, Studio Weave’s Intelligent Garden pavilion wore a facade of fluted mycelium panels grown from agricultural waste in Sebastian Cox’s Kent workshop. It won Gold, and rather than being thrown away when the show closed, it is being rebuilt permanently at Mayfield Park in Manchester. Mycelium bricks are turning up in botanical gardens too, like the little house above in New York.
03 Packaging you can eat
Notpla, short for “not plastic,” makes packaging from seaweed and plants that breaks down in weeks. Its Ooho pods have held water at marathons and sauces at takeaways, and its coatings line cardboard food boxes. The company says it has already replaced more than 16 million single-use plastic items across ten European markets, and it is aiming for a billion by 2030.
04 Shopping bags from the sea
Sway turns seaweed into thin, flexible film that behaves like the plastic polybags every piece of online clothing arrives in. After winning the Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize, it moved into real supply chains, with outdoor and apparel brands including prAna and Faherty shipping in Sway bags since late 2024.
05 Walls made of baker’s yeast
The packet in your pantry that makes bread rise has been printed into architecture. Researchers at Chalmers blend heat deactivated yeast with cellulose, algae derived alginate and glycerol into a gel that a robotic arm prints at room temperature. It dries into panels in shades from cream to deep amber, with no pigment at all. We wrote about it in August.
From the guide See twelve more grown materials in Sustainable Design
Chapter 02
Waste Into Material
Nothing is ever thrown away. It just goes somewhere else. The designers in this chapter start from that somewhere else, and treat trash as a raw material with a story built in.
06 Leather from a cactus
Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez grow nopal cactus on a rain-fed ranch in Mexico, harvest the mature leaves without killing the plant, and turn them into a supple material used for bags, shoes and car interiors. It is not plastic free, since a binder holds it together, but it replaces a much larger share of petroleum and animal hide than most alternatives.
07 The rivers that feed the ocean, intercepted
Most ocean plastic arrives by river, so The Ocean Cleanup started catching it there. Its solar powered Interceptors are barges that steer floating trash into a conveyor and onto dumpsters, working quietly day and night. By 2025 it had twenty of them working in nine countries, from Guatemala to Los Angeles.
08 A board made of old clothes
70%
end-of-life textiles
Kvadrat Really presses discarded wool and cotton into solid boards for tabletops, benches and wall panels. No dye goes in, so each batch takes the color of whatever was thrown away, flecked like terrazzo.
Designers from Max Lamb to Jonathan Olivares have built furniture from it, which is exactly the point: it is a material you choose for how it looks, and the fact that it used to be a pile of old uniforms is the bonus.
Chapter 03
Building That Grows Back
Buildings and construction account for roughly a third of global energy related emissions, and most of it hides in two materials: concrete and steel. The architects here are reaching for timber, earth and living plants instead, and the results are some of the most beautiful buildings of the decade.
09 The tallest timber tower on Earth
This summer a tower of glass and timber topped out beside Sydney’s Central Station at around 180 metres and 39 storeys, making it the tallest hybrid timber building in the world. Roughly 10,000 cubic metres of engineered wood sit on a steel frame, and the team expects about half the upfront embodied carbon of a conventional tower. For scale, the previous height benchmark, Ascent MKE in Milwaukee, stands at about 87 metres.
From the archive The World’s Tallest Timber Tower Just Reached the Sky Over Sydney
10 A hotel stacked from wooden boxes
In a small city just below the Arctic Circle, White Arkitekter built a culture centre with a 20 storey, 75 metre hotel tower made from prefabricated cross laminated timber modules, grown and milled in the forests around it. The building won the CTBUH award for Best Tall Building in Europe in 2023, and it still feels like a quiet manifesto: warm, local and entirely buildable.
11 A house printed from mud
About 60 m³ of local soil, 350 printed layers, 200 hours of printing. No bricks, no concrete, no waste.
TECLA looks like something a wasp would build, which is not an accident. Two robotic arms printed its twin domes from raw earth dug on site, mixed with rice husks and water. When it is no longer needed, it can return to the field it came from.
From the archive The First 3D Printed Home From Raw Earth
12 A forest you can live in
Two towers of 110 and 76 metres carry around 800 trees and some 20,000 shrubs and plants on their cantilevered balconies, the equivalent of a hectare of woodland folded upward. More than a decade on, the Vertical Forest has become a species of its own, copied from Eindhoven to Nanjing, and it still changes colour with the seasons.
From the archive Milan’s Living Skyscraper Which is Redefining Urban Design
From the guide More timber, earth and bamboo buildings in Sustainable Design
Chapter 04
Energy, Made Beautiful
Clean energy used to look like an afterthought bolted to a roof. The newest ideas are more interesting: heat stored in sand, sails reinvented by aerospace engineers, and ferries that lift clear of the water.
13 A battery made of sand
100 MWh
of heat stored in crushed soapstone
Inside a silo about 13 metres wide and 15 metres tall, 2,000 tonnes of crushed soapstone are heated with cheap, surplus wind and solar power, then release that warmth into the town’s district heating for weeks. It let Pornainen stop burning oil for heat, cutting the network’s emissions by around 70 percent.
It is a strikingly low tech answer to a high tech problem: sand does not wear out, does not catch fire and costs almost nothing. We think it is one of the most elegant pieces of infrastructure built anywhere in 2025.
14 Solar that plugs into your balcony
Germany now has more than 1.3 million registered plug in solar kits, small panels clipped to railings and plugged into an ordinary socket. Since 2024 they can feed up to 800 watts, and in 2025 Utah became the first US state to legalise them. Renters, who were locked out of rooftop solar, are suddenly part of the energy transition. More on plug in solar at Solarly.
15 Wind sails, rebuilt as wings
Shipping carries most of the world’s trade and burns some of the dirtiest fuel there is. Oceanbird’s answer is a 40 metre tall, 14 metre wide rigid wing that folds down for bridges and ports. The first was fitted to the car carrier Tirranna and completed sea trials this year. A purpose built wind powered carrier is still on the drawing board, but the sail is real, and it is gorgeous.
16 The ferry that flies
Candela’s P-12 lifts out of the water on computer controlled foils, carrying 30 passengers at up to 25 knots while using around 80 percent less energy than a diesel ferry. With almost no wake it can run fast through quiet waterways, and Stockholm has expanded its service since the first boat launched. More on electric boats at Electric Future.
From the guide See more clean energy and transport design in the guide
Fog Signals. We send one quiet letter a week with the most beautiful ideas we find, from biomaterials to buildings to the art that inspires them. Join Fog Signals, it is free.
Chapter 05
Repairing the Water
Some of the most moving design stories we have ever published are about water: catching it from the air, cleaning it, and helping the life in it grow back.
17 Drinking water, caught from the fog
On the slopes of Mount Boutmezguida, rows of fine mesh comb droplets from the Atlantic fog. The water drips into gutters, then pipes, then taps in the homes of villages that used to spend hours a day fetching it. At last count the system’s roughly 600 square metres of nets delivered around 6,300 litres a day to more than 400 people in five villages, and the project is run and maintained by local women.
18 Reefs grown on steel stars
Mars coats hexagonal steel frames, called Reef Stars, with sand and ties living coral fragments to them, then links them into a web across damaged rubble. Within a few years the stars disappear under new growth. By 2025 the program had planted around 225,000 fragments at 124 sites in 17 countries, and fish returned faster than anyone expected.
From the guide More ocean and water projects in Sustainable Design
Chapter 06
Objects Built to Last
The greenest phone is the one you already own. A new generation of products is designed around that idea, with screws instead of glue, parts you can order online, and software support measured in years rather than months.
19 A phone you can fix with one screwdriver
iFixit gave the Fairphone 6 a perfect 10 out of 10 for repairability. Twelve parts, including the screen and battery, swap out with a single screwdriver, and Fairphone promises software support until 2033. It is not the fastest phone you can buy. It may well be the one you keep the longest.
20 The laptop that upgrades itself
Framework designs its laptops so a new mainboard drops into an old chassis, and ports are small cards you slide in and out. Owners of the very first model can install this year’s processors. The Design Museum put one on display, which tells you how much this humble idea has changed the conversation.
21 A law that makes repair the default
+12 months
of extra legal guarantee when you choose repair
Under the EU’s Right to Repair Directive, which member states had to write into national law by 31 July 2026, choosing repair over replacement extends your legal guarantee by a year. Makers of phones, washing machines and other everyday goods must offer repairs at a reasonable price, long after the warranty ends.
Retailers are moving too. IKEA’s US Buy Back program now accepts close to 3,000 types of furniture back for resale. Design that lasts is starting to look less like a niche and more like the rules of the game.
From the guide More objects designed to leave no trace
Chapter 07
Cities That Breathe
Cities are where most of us live, and where the biggest changes are already happening, one street and one park at a time.
22 Kongjian Yu, the man who taught cities to drink
A year ago today, on 23 September 2025, the landscape architect Kongjian Yu died in a plane crash in Brazil. He was 62. His idea was simple and radical: stop fighting floods with concrete, and let cities soak up water like a sponge, with wetlands, terraced riverbanks and parks designed to flood.
Yanweizhou Park in Jinhua, with its bright red bridge snaking over seasonal wetlands, won World Landscape of the Year in 2015. China adopted his sponge city idea as national policy in 2014, and his studio Turenscape completed more than 600 projects. Few designers have changed how so many people live. We dedicate this post to him.
23 Streets given back to people
Barcelona’s superblocks close groups of streets to through traffic and fill them with trees, benches and playgrounds. Poblenou came first in 2016, then Sant Antoni in 2018, and in 2023 Consell de Cent became a green axis crossing the Eixample. The citywide plan has since been scaled back, but walk down Consell de Cent on a weekday and you can hear birds where there used to be traffic.
From the guide See more cities that grow in Sustainable Design
Chapter 08
Borrowed From Nature
Nature has had 3.8 billion years of research and development. Biomimicry is the practice of reading that library, and some of its best ideas came from people who simply paid attention.
24 A bullet train shaped like a kingfisher
Early bullet trains made a sonic boom as they left tunnels. Eiji Nakatsu, a JR West engineer and keen birdwatcher, noticed how a kingfisher dives into water with barely a splash, and reshaped the 500 Series nose after its beak. The train got quieter, faster and more efficient. The last of them is set to retire in 2027, so if you want to ride one, go soon.
25 A beetle that drinks the fog, and a leaf that cleans itself
In 2001 Andrew Parker and Chris Lawrence described in Nature how a Namib Desert beetle collects water on its bumpy back from the morning fog, and it has inspired fog harvesting surfaces ever since. The lotus leaf, meanwhile, is covered in microscopic bumps that make water bead and roll away with the dirt, an effect now used in self cleaning paints and glass.
The same thinking scales up to buildings. Mick Pearce’s Eastgate Centre in Harare, opened in 1996, borrowed the airflow of termite mounds to cool itself with very little air conditioning, and it is still studied by architects today.
From the guide More designs learning from living things
Closing
What These Designs Have in Common
Look back over these 25 ideas and a pattern appears. None of them asks you to settle for less. The mushroom packaging is lighter, the timber tower is warmer, the ferry is quieter, the phone lasts longer, the park is more beautiful when it floods. The best sustainable design is not a sacrifice. It is simply better design.
That is why we started Sustainable Design, our new visual guide. It brings together more than a decade of our stories on biomaterials, clean tech, green architecture and the people behind them. If you love the optimism of Retrofuturism, think of this as its real world sequel: the future people imagined, finally being built.
Questions
Sustainable Design, Answered
What is sustainable design?
Sustainable design is the practice of creating buildings, products, materials and systems that meet people’s needs while using fewer resources, producing less waste and pollution, and lasting longer. The best examples, like mycelium packaging or timber towers, are also more beautiful and more pleasant to use.
What are biomaterials?
Biomaterials are materials grown or made from living things, such as mycelium (the root network of fungi), seaweed, cactus, algae and agricultural waste. Many are compostable at the end of their life, and some can replace plastic, leather or foam.
Is mycelium leather sustainable?
Mycelium leather can grow in days on farm waste and needs far less land and water than animal leather, but its footprint depends on the coatings and backings used. The industry is still young: pioneer MycoWorks closed its South Carolina plant in 2025 and shifted strategy, a reminder that scaling new materials is hard.
What is the tallest timber building in the world?
Atlassian Central in Sydney, which topped out in July 2026 at around 180 metres, is the tallest hybrid timber building in the world. Ascent MKE in Milwaukee, at about 87 metres, is among the tallest buildings with a mass timber structure.
Sources
- UNEP Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction
- OECD Global Plastics Outlook
- Circularity Gap Report 2026
- Global E-waste Monitor 2024
- Chatham House on low carbon cement
- Dezeen on the mycelium garden pavilion
- MycoWorks facility closure
- Packaging Europe on Notpla
- Packaging Dive on Sway
- The Ocean Cleanup, rivers
- Kvadrat Really textile board
- Dezeen on Atlassian Central
- White Arkitekter, Sara Cultural Centre
- WASP on TECLA
- Stefano Boeri Architetti, Vertical Forest
- Polar Night Energy, Pornainen sand battery
- Industriebox on German balcony solar
- Alfa Laval on the Oceanbird sea trial
- Candela P-12
- UNFCCC on Dar Si Hmad fog harvesting
- Building Coral 2025 impact report
- iFixit Fairphone 6 teardown
- Framework Laptop 12
- European Commission, Right to Repair Directive
- IKEA US Buy Back
- Dezeen on Kongjian Yu
- Barcelona superblocks
- Nippon.com on the 500 Series
- Parker and Lawrence, Nature (2001)
Photos from Wikimedia Commons are credited in each caption under their Creative Commons licenses. Other images are from the Moss and Fog archive.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
1 Comment
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