My passion for design and making has always centered around environmental sustainability, adaptive reuse, and upcycling. I am fascinated by creating value from waste and by telling the story of a material through design. My goal is to produce beautifully crafted objects with the hope that they are used daily, cherished, and passed on to the next generation. 

As an environmentalist and a maker, I have struggled with the notion of trying to save the earth by making more things, especially at a time when we need to drastically reduce consumption and our carbon footprint—it’s often felt like a huge contradiction. 

We are in a crisis. How do we make less, with great attention and mindfulness? 

We cannot continue to develop, make, buy, and use things that are only slightly less bad than conventional products, greenwashing our way into feeling fine. As designers we need to lead by creating products that are carbon negative— made from materials that sequester more carbon than they create in manufacturing and use. At end of life these products need to be easily reformed into new products for full circularity or returned to the ground to propagate soil regeneration and additional sequestration. How do we manifest products that are truly net zero or even carbon negative? We must focus our energy and invest in objects and businesses that are part of the solution not later but now. 

 

Equally important is the scalability of these products and enterprises. Unless we can create solutions that are on a path to affordability, they will never have the impact we need to make real change.

Let the Biochar revolution begin.

BIO

 

Bill Hilgendorf grew up in Boston MA, but fell in love with furniture design and interiors while living in Stockholm, Sweden, in search of his roots. After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in industrial design he moved to Brooklyn and co-founded the multi-disciplinary firm Uhuru in 2003. For almost two decades Bill has employed design to tell the story of discarded objects and underutilized materials. In 2016 Bill co-founded Wilderkill a family retreat in the Catskill mountains as a place for small groups and families to connect with nature and learn more about their environmental impact. After at trip to Gothenburg to study innovation in sustainability, Bill stepped back from day to day operations at uhuru in 2020 to focus his energy more directly on the climate crisis. With a growing obsession with Biochar, he co-founded Eldr Six as a launchpad dedicated to developing and showcasing upcycled carbon negative materials and products. With the singular focus on localized material innovation around Biochar he is working on the next generation of carbon sequestration and net-zero products. Currently Bill lives and works in between Brooklyn and the Catskills with his wife and fellow designer Maria Cristina and their two children.