Kickstarter

Dutch designer Thom Bindels has developed Ecosystem Kickstarter, a honeycomb-shaped cardboard frame that can help small-scale farmers grow crops in degraded soil. The simple, modular, cardboard system, which was first presented at Dutch Design Week, is embedded in a slope of degraded earth and filled with local soil.This forms a terracing structure to prevent the runoff of seeds and nutrients in rainwater.

Besides, Kickstarter is a biodegradable material that will eventually degrade into nutrients for plants and seeds, which will break the vicious cycle of soil erosion and allow the soil to slowly restore nutrients. This will enable the Ecosystem to reach the ecological threshold of self-restoration again, so that the ecological environment can be self-sustaining. In order to achieve this goal, the designer spent two years in South Africa integrating existing anti-erosion measures to design this low-cost product, so that it can be applied worldwide. The holes in the product are for the root structure of the plant to hold the soil in place so that the plant can survive.