• Fast Company, Friday, January 22, 2010 10:28 AM

The chemical engineers at Dow Chemical have a new renewable, organically based material called Renuva that is made from the waste material of soybean processing and can be turned into plastics and gels not much different than those derived from petroleum, blogs Kaomi Goetz. But how to get consumers to notice, no less care?

Eric Pfeiffer, a San Francisco-based industrial designer, is helping Dow by turning the raw material into products like end tables, stools and wall mounts that consumers can see, relate to, and understand.

"It took a little bit, to get our mind around this," says Umberto Torresan, a marketing manager at Dow. "But as we started to interact with consumers, we started coming up with more ideas, such as what kinds of products mean something to people. [Pfeiffer] was the bridge for the translation. As a designer, he has a powerful way of communicating things."

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