Not just second-hand stores can provide opportunities for discovering reclaimed materials. Venture out to university departments and local shops to ask if they have unused, used, or outdated materials.
Go explore
Buying, selling, and trading reusable pieces of Seattle’s architectural past to the community. The site includes fun ideas for salvaging old materials and customer photos for inspiration.
Pacific Northwest store for environmentally friendly, inspiring home and building materials made locally and all around the world.
A grassroots, nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.
Pacific Northwest “trash to treasure” material exchange for unwanted by products, surpluses, and wastes.
A King County site for buying and selling relatively inexpensive, reusable materials and household items to keep them out of the waste system.
An online resource for finding information and reviews on local services.
Seattle’s favorite eco-friendly salvage resource for home and building materials. The store locations will also accept unwanted materials for resale.
Seattle printer of display graphics of all kinds. They specialize in sustainable materials and processes and have SGP certification from the Sustainable Green Printing Partnership.
University of Washington Surplus Store (“UW Surplus”)
Wonder where all of the old, outdated equipment and material from across campus ends up? Come here to find out. It can be a treasure trove of intriguing odds and ends.
Ask your printer for misprints or “make ready” sheets which are the sheets they run through the press many times over to get it up to speed. Great patterns and textures.
Beautiful mistakes
Best Practices for Green Printing
A helpful how-to guide for ‘green’ design production when you aren’t sure where to start.
A Seattle-based web initiative connecting people, ideas, art, and science to promote stronger communities and responses to issues of climate change.
An initiative for and by graphic designers aimed at bringing the design community together to make positive, system-wide changes. A place to get in touch with local, like-minded designers.
A place where designers, educators, and business leaders can work together for positive social and environmental change. Check out their newest case studies and initiatives.
The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability
A field guide on product development and lifecycle, including lists of sustainable alternatives to common materials, processes, and finishes. Bite-sized tips, examples, and case studies.
An open site for students and educators to engage in and showcase socially responsible design projects while educating underserved youth on design and business.
Learn more about different environmental certifications, what they mean, and how they’re used on the materials you buy.
A place to co-create, share, and showcase best practices, tools, stories and ideas for sustain- able action across all design disciplines.
Put together by London-based designer Caroline Clark, this is an accessible and inspiring site filled with practical tips on designing green.
Online database of over 4,500 innovative and sustainable materials and manufacturing processes.
An inspiring case study of Puma and Fuseproject’s redesign of the shoebox.
Accessible, step-by-step plans for designing with the environment in mind, including valuable tools to calculate the impacts of your projects.
An open-source platform providing information on supply chains (where things come from and what they’re made of) so that the public can make sustainable choices and share them with the world.
Studio Matthews’ Ten Tips for Designing Green
Ten sustainable strategies matched with case studies of Studio Matthews projects. Also check out thomas.matthews, the London design practice jointly founded by Kristine Matthews and Sophie Thomas in 1998.
Visual Encyclopedia of Manufacturing
Learn about how things are made, through the eyes of your peers. A visual encyclopedia of manufacturing processes, labor conditions, and environmental accounts of familiar products.
This seminal Seattle-based media network of journalists, designers, and thinkers stopped operating in 2010, but is still a great resource for articles and information.