We want to educate people, convince them that going eco can be easy," says Livia Giuggioli. "There are so many beautiful products that people don't know about. Being ecological isn't only for nerds or hippies - it can be sexy and sensual." Giuggioli should know: last week, she and her husband, the actor Colin Firth, opened Eco, a shop in Chiswick selling an environmentally friendly lifestyle.
Going green can seem a bit of a bore. Al Gore is lovely, but few would describe his eco-blockbuster, An Inconvenient Truth, as sexy. And green people often seem just a bit try-hard (give one big eco-turbine wave to Dave and Samantha Cameron).
Of course, this is different from fashion trends: a good chair is for life, and ditching your sofa for new products just because they're ethical just blocks up landfills, which defeats the point. But many designers are now producing environmentally friendly products. So your next bookshelf can be both ethical and desirable. The Wow-Wow Eco Design Shop sells everything from handbags made from recycled waste to solar panels; Ryan Frank is making furniture from discarded materials; Graham & Brown has produced its first 100% environmentally sound wallpaper; and Tom Dixon gave away 1,000 energy-saving light bulbs in Trafalgar Square as part of Design Week 2007.
"People are becoming increasingly aware of the negative in the things they buy, and it's created a kind of consumer depression," says Wow-Wow's Jonny Parker. "We want to say, 'This is how things could be', not 'This is what's wrong with the world'. " For him, fashion is not something at odds with being eco: "Our products don't look like they're there for tree-huggers - they're contemporary and modern." There's a similar message from Sixixis, which makes limited-edition furniture from locally sourced wood. The company uses the traditional process of steam-bending, which is less wasteful than the usual methods of mass production, with barely a carbon footprint to show for it. "We're as much about the design as the production process and the material," says co-creator Tom Raffield. "Our techniques don't hold us back from being innovative." One of the more daring pieces has been the Rolling Summer House - a sculpture that people can get into and then roll around their garden in. Other highlights include an asymmetric rocking chair, which scores points for being probably the first chair described by its maker as "quite intense".
Another designer pushing the envelope is Ryan Frank, who creates pieces from discarded furniture and objects salvaged from the street.
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His Hackney Shelf - made from boards he left out in the streets so they would get graffitied - has become a cult object. His Inkuku chair is made from plastic shopping bags and recycled aluminium, and the Strata range offers classic chairs and tables made from bits of old furniture. For Frank, recycling is no marketing ploy - he just loves the history that an old element brings to a new product.
These are designers who are eco not only because they support sustainability, but because it suits their work processes - it is, literally, natural to them. For Sixixis's Raffield, "there's a passion about it. We want to create something people will fall in love with for a lifetime and more. We all realise we're trashing our world a little too much".
For Dixon, stylish sustainability isn't just a flash-in-the-pan trend. "If anything," he says, "it's not trendy enough." But hippies beware - that won't be the case for much longer.