You won’t find any discarded firefighting hose lying around London. It’s all been turned into handbags by Kresse Wesling and her husband Elvis (above). The pair are founders of Elvis & Kresse, a luxury brand that uses “heroic” waste as the main material in their line of bags and accessories.

Kresse has had a love affair with waste ever since she moved from Western Canada to Hong Kong. The shock turned her into an environmentalist. “I spent a lot of my time camping and hiking in unspoilt, natural beauty until I was 17 years old. Then I moved to Hong Kong where I saw the untreated sewerage of seven million people running directly into the sea,” she recalls. “What should have been shark infested waters was barren because sharks couldn’t hunt – they couldn’t smell their prey.”

Not political by nature and not designed for the corporate world, Kresse decided to pour her newfound passion into recycling. She met Elvis on a boat in Hong Kong and they moved in together the next day. “I fell in love with him immediately,” she says, “and it was the same with the fire hose when I discovered it, because it’s a story that you can fall in love with.” The couple moved to London in 2004 and they where they were shocked at how heavily reliant the U.K. was on landfill. “Such a small island with so many people, with no land to spare,” says Kresse. “Yet 100 million tons of waste was being buried every year.” During an environmental management course Kresse discovered the London Fire Brigade’s decommissioned fire hose.

After a distinguished career fighting fires and saving lives; that could last up to 25 years; the hoses were destined for landfills. London had a whole team dedicated to patching and refurbishing them, but ultimately they were shipped off and buried. “Landfill was an indecent end for such a heroic material,” thought Kresse. She started rescuing them and wondering how they could be put back into service under the guise of fashion. The catalyst came quite by chance. Elvis had inherited an old belt from his father that had developed cracks in the leather. He decided to replace the leather with fire hose and while fixing the old belt buckle to it’s this new sturdy material, Kresse got a call from the team working on merchandise for London’s Live Earth concert.

They were looking for something green for the event and Kresse impulsively offered them 1,000 belts made from fire hose. After experimenting with different ideas, they realized that their products needed to emulate classic luxury items, the iconic accessories that form part of permanent collections of major fashion houses. But their battle had just begun; they couldn’t find a British manufacturer to share their excitement, rarely getting further than a phone call with disinterested factory owners. They had the same response in other European countries too, until they discovered a small, family-run factory in Romania that was willing to help. “They had three vital qualities,” recalls Kresse.

“A gap in their production schedule, a serious pedigree of production for major luxury brands, and they believed (as we did) that the fire hose deserved to be treasured, something of beauty in it’s own right.” The range Elvis & Kresse handbags, wallets and belts soon began looking like the coveted items seen in leading luxury retailers. A meeting with Donna Karon saw the fashion icon agree to stock the items in her New York store, Urban Zen. More materials soon followed, with some of their handbags now lined with reclaimed military-grade parachute silk. Kresse has always had an obsession with waste and likes nothing better than discovering and intercepting something new.

She can be found six days of the month tramping around industrial waste yards in her Wellington boots sourcing new materials. The challenge is the same every time – what can they do to prove value, change perception, and respect these resources. “Fall in love with a problem,” she says. “If you’re fixing something there is a sense of purpose, which can push you through the difficult, early years. Creating something new, that no one else has, can make you unique and in demand. This works for both waste and luxury,” she says.

“We dream of a time without landfill, when everything is recycled or composted. Between now and then we know there are far too many incredible materials that will either languish under ground or suffer the indignity of incineration; when that happens we lose, we lose quality, narrative, and the opportunity to do something great,” says Kresse of the couple’s business vision.

The pair have interceded in a waste supply chain, choosing story laden materials of incredible character, and do everything they can to ensure their second life is as long as possible. They are constantly searching for more materials to grow their range of bags, belts and wallets, and have so far rescued over 200 tons of waste. The business has grown to a point where it now collects and uses all the discarded fire hose in the city of London.

Kresse and Elvis decided from the start that the role of a fire fighter is one of bravery, loyalty and devotion to public service and that the materials they collected from fire departments around London should in some way benefit them too. They donate 50% of their profits to the Fire Fighters Charity (FFC), an organization that has already supported hundreds of thousands of fire and rescue workers with injuries, illness, stress or bereavement.

Kresse found the green movement to be a bit depressing and needing to change. “The guilt has to go,” she says. “We have to sell new ideas and they have to be compelling and more wonderful than the less green, less ethical alternatives.” She also believes in the power of positive marketing and feels there is no reason why the upbeat affirmation of mainstream marketing should not be applied to products like fire hoses made into luxury handbags.

The company now work with about 15 other materials and the goal for each material is the same. They only adopt a material they think they can find a solution for. Glass is ignored as it already has a huge culture of recyling, with the couple chosing to focus on new and exciting materials without a history of recycling. They are currently working on a leather reclamation project, having identified scrap leather as a real problem in the U.K., and have come up with an innovative way to turn it into building blocks. “What I like about the luxury market is that there is an inherent respect for materials, resources, talent and time,” says Kresse. “Luxury really values highly skilled people, and training and has a value about it that makes you buy well and buy once. We could never make anything for the fast fashion industry – it’s waste after all that is killing us.”

It’s a fascinating time for the pair to be involved the environmental sector because so many celebrities endorse luxury goods and at the same time are aware of green and social issues. Luxury goods companies have always relied on narratives to sell their products, but will start sounding increasingly hollow if they are not based on something tangible. “The luxury consumer doesn’t do lip service very well,” says Kresse. “They are really good at seeing through greenwashing and really good at researching a product. If someone is going to spend £300 on a handbag, they’re going to research it and the story has to be authentic. The future of luxury is authenticity, which is actually great for anything social or environmental.”

Kresse’s view on business is based on the pragmatic observation that government’s are just too slow to make a difference to problems that need attention immediately. “Business is faster than government in solving the world’s problems and it’s absolutely vital that if we want change we need to make it happen within the next ten years, otherwise we are absolutely screwed.

Business needs to lead this initiative,” she says. Using discared material to make things is not new, it’s happening everywhere. India, the Phillipines and Mexico are places where people who collect waste aren’t paid for a days work, but rather on the value of what they reclaim. In many places this is unsafe and dangerous but is still essentially what Kresse and Elvis do.

“The bizarre thing is that here in Britain, where we live, we are seen as innovative,” says Kresse, “but in many other countries we would be just part of the general recycling milieu.”

“Ultimately, it’s about how much you love the material and how much time and energy you invest in it. You rarely see a genuine luxury product that isn’t oozing craftsmanship. That has to be there otherwise no one will buy it,” she says. The challenge they now face is how to grow their business without compromising their core principles.

They were recently introduced as ‘the future of luxury’ at a launch party. While many might see their profit-sharing arrangement with a fireman’s charity as strange business practice, Kresse displays the same dismissive attitude as she had towards her early detractors: “Why not share, why not see if more good could be done with the surplus of an already good business. Why not?”

Daniel Joutard (above, left) couldn’t resist the call of the Amazon. He’s now built an innovation cosmetics brand in France, based on the magical properties of plants.

“My company is a combination of magic and science,” says Daniel Joutard, founder of French cosmetics company Aïny Savoirs des Peuples. A business school grounding and consultancy work for large corporations around Europe had always kept Joutard very rational. He knew the world was ruled by reason and science and had always been skeptical of “magical” claims by far flung tribes that plants could heal you. Yet he couldn’t seem to stay away from the remote communities of Ecuador and the Andes region of Latin America, with whom he found a strange attraction.

It started when Joutard became fascinated with native Latin American culture. He’d studied for six months in Mexico and became more interested, so decided to go and work fo three months in Ecuador. “I was so fascinated by the way native people see the world,” he remembers of his first encounters. “When you work with indigenous people you realise they see the world in a very different way, for them everything is magic, everything has a soul: the trees, human beings, stones and rivers. This was very different from my life in France, where we believe firmly in science.

When you see the world in a magical way it becomes more poetical and you have to respect it so much more.” Joutard found himself being drawn in deeper each time he returned and observed how intuitive the locals were when they needed to heal their sick with “magic” plants. “I didn’t believe in it at all, says Joutard, “but when I was sick in the middle of the Amazon, with no medics around, I only had the local communities to rely on, and they cured me. I might not have been very open minded to their medicine, but it worked. They call it ‘magic’ and we call it ‘science’, but it had the same end result and that is how my business began.”

Back in France between stints as a microcredit manager in Peru, Joutard decided he wanted to work with sacred plants. He had no idea where to start, but had a breakthrough in 2006 when he contacted Jean Le Joliff, former R&D director at Chanel, who agreed to 30 minutes of his time. The meeting lasted all afternoon with Le Joliff ending up offering his services for free.

They began their research, hired a chemical engineer and created a lab. It took three years to transform the seeds they had sourced from Peru into active cosmetic extracts, and then a while longer to turn it into a unique cream. In 2008 at Beyond Beauty, the most important cosmetics fair in France, they were awarded the jury’s special award and the following year were awarded for best natural and organic brand. By September 2009 the products were on sale.

As with all luxury products that come with a high price tag, the elements of time and highly-skilled craftsmanship are the most coveted ingredients. “Time intensive, the hand of man, limited quantity and quality mean luxury,” says Joutard. The company starts with barks and leaves that are turned into creams in a process that takes over three years. They produce two products a year, nothing else. An Ecuadorian healer that he met years ago has played a starring role in the company.

“She opened the door to understanding what I could not understand before,” says Joutard. “She taught me that listening comes before making any statement.” She has been present at all key moments of Aïny and even gave them the company name. Aïny can have several meanings, but mainly “I help you today, you help me tommorow,” a mainstay of the native communities of the Andes. Luckily, for the companies expansionist views, the name also means “I love you” in Chinese. He was initially told, “You must be mad to start a new cosmetics company in France.”

It’s the most competitive market in the world, with giant local players and foreign players trying to push in to gain the historic legitimacy the country has to offer around cosmetics. Joutard was also warned that he’d need millions of euros to launch a new brand, which he didn’t have. A little known fact in France is the support to be found from national agencies. The support he found for his innovation was decisive during their three years of research and development.

Aïny Savoirs des Peuples are now at a point where they sell their knowledge to other corporations, who are too busy to invest the same time that Joutard has. Mainstream commercial cosmetics companies are usually in a hurry to get their product to market and three years of production is out of the question. “It’s slow work when you work with indigenous people,” explains Joutard. “You mustn’t be in a hurry because they aren’t. If you are in a hurry they don’t work.”

And unlike the world’s largets cosmetics companies Joutard does not believe in putting any patents on the plants they have “discovered.” “We are betting that by creating trustful relationship with communities we will know about something that gives us a strategic advantage, before other companies catch on,” says Joutard.

He also publically publishes certain parts of their innovative research on plants, effectively blocking other cosmetic companies from claiming the ideas are theirs. This has the affect of keeping everybody at the same level, with Joutard’s advantage being that he is quicker at getting the world to know about the next interesting plant. “Ours is a different way of thinking,” says Jotard. “Our industry is based on patents – everybody tries to put patents on plants to create a monoploy, but we do the opposite.” To highlight the scale of the problem: France even has a national commission that fights against biopiracy.

A three year battle recently saw the commission force some French cosmetics companies to give up patents on indigenous plants in Peru. There are many examples of large companies patenting indigenous plants and foods around the world. Much of the pharmaceutical industry depends on a window of opportunity too, protected by patents for 11 years before it becomes public property.

Sometimes the game can get dirty. In 2012 Joutard was handed down four legal orders from the government, having been denounced by a competitor wanting to eliminate them. “Other cosmetic companies don’t like us to say patents are not fair because all their business is based on patents,” says Joutard. “It’s part of our new role as an alternative type of cosmetics company to innovate in terms of science and around social issues too. Perhaps we can try and identify the future of our industry too, which we’re hoping will look like what we’re building now.”

Aïny Savoirs des Peuplesbroke even in 2013 and are finally seeing some cash come in. They have developed a fair trade system with the communities that originally helped them get started, as a way of giving back. “The value of our products is not the plants themselves, says Joutard. “Its knowledge. So we give back 4 percent of our profits to the native organisations that are elected by the communities we work in. They then use the money for the good of their community.”

He has tried to foster entrepreneurship among the native people by treaching them how to create their own cosmetics but it has been tough going. “Its difficult to turn indigenous people into industrial people and entrepeneurs,” he says. This brings up the much-debated dilemna around globalization: many communities have survived just fine without the developed world’s intervention, yet the developing world is also desperate for knowledge and industry that will allow them to enjoy the same benefits of the developed world.

Is the 39 year-old Joutard worried about the future? If he is, his boyish face is certainly not showing it. “I use my own products on my face and it certainly helps,” he says.

Driving into a parking area with a giant Pepsi logo illuminated beneath you in broad daylight, uninterrupted cell phone coverage while you drive, thanks to “leaky” cables running alongside the road, a highway that generates enough power to charge your electric car, light up road markings at night and feed excess power into a power grid. Welcome to the smart road of the future, made of glass. Scott Brusaw and his wife Julie have been working on the idea of a smart power generating road for 8 years and were thrilled when the US Federal Highway Administration recently expressed an interest in what they were doing and provided them with the funding to move their concept forward.

Their company, Solar Roadways, is now looking at the huge opportunities that exist for roads that pay their way – by creating electricity and reducing maintenance costs with a modular, Lego-like simplicity that could save billions. Like all great ideas, that also happen to be the simplest, the venture is poised to change the way we think and also to inevitably attract a slew of imitators. Brusaw never considered himself an environmentalist, until he watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, after whichhe began thinking more deeply about the effects of fossil fuels on the environment.

His wife Julie, a co-founder of Solar Roadways, has always considered him an environmentalist, even though he originally considered environmentalists crazy, with delusional ideas. Ironically, by ignoring the emotive messages and focusing on a solution, he has emerged as a potential giant among conservationists, by cutting greenhouse gases by 75 percent with his invention. Rather than being swayed by emotive arguments around environmental issues that just acknowledged a problem, Brusaw began thinking about how he could help solve the problem.

The town of Sandpoint, Idaho has enthusiastically embraced the new technology.

An engineer by trade, it was already in Brusaw nature to find solutions. If global warming was such a big problem, he thought, then why were no solutions being put forward? Amazingly, this was only eight years ago in 2006, and Brusaw hadn’t seen many people stepping forward to meet the challenge. After watching An Inconvenient Truth he began reading up on topics such as climate crisis and realized that the reason nobody was doing anything was because the problem was so huge, so global in nature, that no single institution or individual would be able to fix it.

Brusaw and his wife took a long look at the situation and came up with a seemingly crazy idea – one he might have laughed at himself during his “pre-environmental” days – electric roads. Although still one step below the flying cars you might see on The Jetsons, the husband and wife team have now created a blue ocean strategy that has propelled roadways into a unique economic opportunity.

Scott and Julie Brusaw with their modular, glass solar panels.

Dull, black asphalt, the chosen material for road surfaces since the 1870s suddenly has competition from its greener cousin, glass. The new road crews are no longer blackened workers either, who breathe toxic fossil fumes. “An interesting situation now arises,” says Brusaw. “Who will own these roads? Is it an electric company or a local government body?

The reason no one has attempted this before is because it’s such a daunting task that covers so many different fields of expertise,” he says. “We have electrical engineers, civil engineers, structural engineers and mechanical engineers all working together. They’re all working together for the first time and it’s a colossal undertaking.” The risk of a copycat company stealing their idea is great, but Brusaw wants to develop the product into something so advanced that he creates a comfortable distance between Solar Roadways and any future competitor.

Brusaw’s earlier innovations seem to point to an enquiring mind that marries two different technologies to create something new. Previous projects include a technology system in Southern Italy that centralized the readings of water meters and devices that allowed immobilized hospital patients to control television sets without their hands. Brusaw, who will shortly ascertain how much government and commercial support he will enjoy, is currently costing early prototypes of these industrial-strength solar panels.

While bureaucratic processes are slow and steady and need to consider existing infrastructures and urban planning implications, the public interest from ordinary people has been overwhelming and has captured their imaginations. Solar Roadways’ fund raising campaign on popular crowdfunding website indiegogo.com has already raised over $2 million in just two months, more than double the original goal of $1 million. With the catchy phrase “Solar Freakin’ Roadways,” the couple have acknowledged the coolness factor of an idea that inherently feels right to the 47,000 people who have pledged their support on the website.

“The biggest perception we need to overcome is that a solar road is not the same as an asphalt one,” explains Brusaw. Asphalt roads require a power distribution system and road maintenance such as pothole filling, line painting and snow ploughing. Many of these functions would fall away with solar panels. “It’s not the same as rooftop solar either,” adds Brusaw. For a start, the modular glass panels can withstand traffic from the heaviest trucks, at least 250,000 pounds worth. The Solar Road Panels can be installed on roads, parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, bike paths and playgrounds. “Literally any surface under the sun,” quips Brusaw with a grin.

The idea is for the solar panels to pay for themselves, primarily through the generation of electricity, which can power homes and businesses, all connected via driveways and parking lots. The company sees a future where a nationwide system might produce more, clean, renewable energy than a country uses. Heating elements inside the panels allow them to stay snow and ice-free and LEDs light up at night, creating road markings and signage. Electric Vehicles will be able to charge with energy from the sun (instead of fossil fuels) while in parking lots and driveways.

A future plan, after a roadway system is in place, is mutual induction technology – that will allow for charging while driving.  Revenue will not only be generated through the creation of power. Power companies who have examined early installations of Solar Roadways have been overjoyed to discover a cable corridor that follows the road, built into the ground level, modular system. This means no more falling trees or ice taking out overhead power lines. Power, cable and telecoms companies would be able to lease and manage the cable corridors, turning future roads into giant, managed Scalextric tracks.

Early studies in the UK have shown that solar lights spaced 20 feet apart along high accident routes, decreased accidents by 70%. Solar Roadways envisions the entire road, and all its markings, becoming a bright, clear and safe pathway for cars and pedestrians alike. “Keeping the Northern US roads clear of snow in winter, alone, has untold potential for saving lives,” says Brusaw. The small town of Sandpoint in Idaho has embraced the idea of solar panel roads wholeheartedly and is preparing to become the first showpiece of this new technology.

While global licensing is on the cards, the couple can barely keep up with the initial, local demand in the US, with many companies holding off on using asphalt in their build, hopeful that the Brusaws’ will get their product to market sooner rather than later. “We worry about Climate Change. We keep hearing reports that it’s happening faster than expected and can help by easing and then eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels, says Brusaw.

“We began our project with the goal of helping with environmental issues and then realized our concept could help the world in so many other ways too.” Ultimately, The implementation of these innovative ideas on a grand scale from Team Brusaw has the potential to create thousands of jobs in the US and around the world. Who knows, replacing the world’s roads might even allow us to all manufacture our way out of our ongoing economic crisis. One glass panel at a time.