Due to an imbalance between imports and exports, every year 26.1 million shipping container loads travel from China, but only 12.9m loads travel back to China – meaning that half of the containers going back to Asia are empty, a fact that designer Innovation Design Engineering graduate Philippe Hohlfeld stumbled upon after eating a banana and wondering where it came from. “A quick Google search revealed that bananas, just as 90{ff546b69e23b1524d799f96c6ba7a638e1f677053b0a2a1568b05315fd5f8fc7} of all consumer goods, travel thousands of miles in containers to finally arrive in shops conveniently located right next to our front doors,” he told Design Geek. “I decided to map out all of the world’s shipping routes. This is when I found that China exports twice as many goods as it imports, and it didn’t take long to figure out what was happening to the rest of the space. I couldn’t believe the amount of resources being wasted on what shipping companies call ‘asset use inefficiency’.”
Philippe decided there and then to find something better to do with the space inside these empty containers – his solution is GrowFrame, a collapsible hydroponic farm that cultivates food in empty shipping containers on their way back to China. Farms filling ten containers collapse into one for the return journey to the UK.
“I was obsessed with finding something that I could manufacture while shipping,” he says. “The problem is that most products require enormous energy, large machinery and multiple processes. Farming, however, requires relatively little energy, only needs nutrients and plants, and after one process, the whole thing is finished. It was a perfect fit for manufacturing in containers.”
Philippe’s floating farm is a refined version of existing hydroponic systems, but it can work autonomously in a completely sealed environment with low technology requirements. “Whereas most hydroponic farms have farmers checking up on them every day, GrowFrame will have to work for three to five weeks without supervision in a sealed environment,” he explains. “GrowFrame tackles these challenges with new solutions for growing media, watering systems, support structures, and lighting.”
It’s an ambitious project, but Philippe makes no apologies for that. “My background, studying Entertainment Design at Gnomon School of VFX in Hollywood, has taught me to dream big and consider all solutions no matter how unfeasible they may seem to start with,” he says. “One of the biggest reasons I chose this course was the fact that I would be in full control of the brief for the final project, which meant I could dream as big as I wanted, without limitations. I didn’t want my project to end up the way that most student projects do: nice ideas in portfolios. Since the opening of the RCA SHOW 2016, I have been lucky enough to talk to many professionals in farming, shipping, and investment about the possibility of creating a trial run of a GrowFrame unit. During the project, I constantly thought about world domination – about creating a business that has influence in all corners of the globe. I am getting closer to realising that dream. I am very optimistic that a GrowFrame unit could be on the oceans as soon as the end of the summer.”
The current proposal relies on Philippe unloading and harvesting the farms once they reach their destination, but he believes there is strong potential to sell his crops to retailers in the Chinese food market as a luxury item. “The benefit of the container crops is that they have a traceable origin and are guaranteed to be safe to eat,” he says. “This can be a huge competitive advantage in the Chinese market.”
Rebalancing global trade, improving food security for Asian markets and improving profitability and logistical sustainability for the shipping industry seem like pretty lofty ambitions for a design graduate, but that’s what Philippe is setting out to achieve. “The ultimate goal of GrowFrame is to turn the air being shipped around the world today into a sustainable farm of tomorrow,” he says with utter confidence.
GrowFrame was shown as part of the London university’s Show RCA 2016 in July.