#6 Putting the E in Ethics
A conversation between Chloe Bullock BIID Reg ID of Materialise Interiors and Romy Rawlings FLI FRSA, Director, DeepGreen.
Interior designer Chloe has spent decades at the sharp end of sustainable practice: from her formative years in The Body Shop HQ’s retail design team under Anita Roddick, to co-founding Interior Design Declares - UK, to her current role on the council of the British Institute of Interior Design (BIID). Throughout our intriguing conversation, she laid out a vision for what responsible design could and should look like, and why what we're currently doing as an industry isn't nearly enough.
Why the Design Industry Needs a New Language
One of Chloe's most striking provocations is a view she's been quietly advancing for some time: we need to stop using the word ‘sustainable’ altogether.
“Sustainability is not going to get us anywhere. We’ve got to do so much more, we need a focus on regeneration.”
As a director of the BIID, she's currently helping to rewrite the organisation's Sustainable Specifying Guide and believes the terminology itself is holding the industry back.
It's a tension she navigates carefully. While Chloe used the S-word in the title of her recent book, because the publishers required instant clarity, within just a few pages she flags its limitations. The greatest challenge, she acknowledges, is that everyone is at different stages of the journey and constantly changing the language risks losing the very people you're trying to bring along. Yet staying comfortable with familiar terminology risks underselling the scale of what's really needed.
Chloe argues, the word itself has also become compromised by its association with consumerism. Sustainability, as currently practised, still largely means buying things, just greener things. 'It's still all about consumerism,' she says. 'And we're all here trying to make a living and sell services.' That discomfort sits at the heart of her practice, where she took the procurement of new products out of her business model eight years ago to disincentivise new and focus on design services instead.
The Gap Between What We Know and What We Do: Is Legislation the Missing Link?
Chloe is, by her own description, 'overtrained and very prepared'! She recently completed a pilot Circular Economy Skills Bootcamp, co-funded by the Department of Education and Brighton & Hove City Council. This deepened her already considerable knowledge of regenerative materials, biomaterials and circular business models.
Her company is a certified B Corp and she co-founded Interior Design Declares, which is currently working to make its pledges both more measurable and actionable. And yet she finds the clients she wants aren't always there.
“There are so many opportunities to do good things in my industry, but you need the clients that want what you do.”
Without legislation, sustainable choices remain what Chloe calls 'nice to haves'. This absolutely echoes my own experience in the world of landscape specification, where everyone wants to be ‘green’ until they see the price! We agreed that storytelling is simply not enough to move us forward: the first things to be cut when a budget is squeezed are almost inevitably the more sustainable options (that are often more expensive for a number of valid reasons).
I fear this will not be news to anyone who designs or specifies in the built environment. It’s a view echoed across the sector and almost every practitioner Chloe speaks to expresses the same frustration. The industry knows what needs to be done. The solutions largely exist. But without regulatory frameworks compelling clients and suppliers to act, meaningful change continues to progress at a glacial pace.
Amidst the doom and gloom, one positive development she highlights is the government's current consultation on toxic chemicals in domestic furniture. This is a long-overdue move that would bring the UK into line with the rest of the world and reduce harm to homeowners, pets, children and firefighters alike. If anyone would like to contribute, they have until the 23 June 2026 (and Chloe urges you to get involved). She's also keenly watching the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, though notes its current focus on carbon and energy leaves wider material and health considerations largely unaddressed.
Rethinking the Principles of Design
A thread running through our conversation is the fundamental link between human wellbeing and environmental health. Chloe is an advocate for what she describes as ‘detoxifying’ the materials used in interiors: not only for planetary reasons, but because the toxic chemicals present in our interior spaces (furniture, fixtures, equipment, finishes, flooring, paints, coatings and adhesives) have direct consequences for the people living with them, and for the animals used in safety testing those chemicals.
She is particularly enthusiastic about the Declare label and the work of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons, which promotes Health Product Declarations (HPDs) alongside the more familiar Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). Her concern around EPDs is subtle but important: the design industry appears to have started treating them as a mark of quality, when in fact they are simply a mark of transparency. An EPD tells you what's in a product. It doesn't tell you whether what's in it is good.
“Just because a product has an EPD, it doesn’t make it good, it just means it’s transparent. You’ve got to read it, assess it, evaluate it and compare it.”
This kind of forensic material literacy is central to Chloe’s practice and to the supply chain pressure she believes designers need to exert more consistently. She describes herself as a circular interior designer first, and notes that her approach is neither dogmatic nor black-and-white: it's a conversation with every client, shaped by what already exists, what can be reused, and what new materials can be brought in without causing additional harm. Her vegan design practice extends this logic. Avoiding animal-derived materials is not primarily an aesthetic choice but an ethical one, and Chloe refuses to have anything in her home that has 'bad energy and a horrific story attached to it.
Pushing Back on the Supply Chain
Chloe is deeply engaged with the question of how to shift supplier behaviour and believes that designers, individually and collectively, hold more leverage than they realise. Her experience at The Body Shop, where she used supplier screening checklists that have more recently informed the BIID's Sustainable Specifying Guide, provided her with an early model of what ethical procurement could look like.
Speaking from my own recent experience assessing a broad range of UK street furniture suppliers, I encountered an all too vivid illustration of this issue: of some twenty companies I reviewed, only two explicitly mentioned having FSC chain-of-custody certification. Several offered tropical hardwoods that could be FSC certified but the implication was that if you wanted the cheaper option, without certification, it would be available. I found that deeply worrying. On the flip side, I’ve seen in practice how this approach can be transformed by an ethical client. I previously worked on a large UK project where FSC certification paperwork was required to accompany every delivery including timber to the site and, if it wasn’t in place, the consignment would be turned away.
This demonstrates what's possible when a sufficiently powerful client holds a firm line that would force every supplier to comply if they knew there was no other option. Chloe agrees that the ripple from designers consistently asking the right questions is already being felt. Timber suppliers who would once have needed chasing for information now lead with their sustainability credentials. Progress is being made, but nowhere near fast enough.
A Blueprint Already Exists: Looking to Wales (and beyond)
One of the most hopeful aspects of our conversation was Chloe's enthusiasm for the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act in Wales. This cross-party piece of legislation, now over a decade old, protects the long-term wellbeing of future generations across all aspects of public life. It was developed through wide consultation, is enshrined in law, and cannot be removed by a change of government.
'It's a working blueprint,' Chloe says. 'So, why don't other just adopt it?' Evidently Scotland, New Zealand, Australia and several other countries have been considering similar frameworks, though none has yet enacted anything comparable. In England, we don’t seem to be anywhere near implementing similar legislation.
Chloe's frustration with the failure to adopt and share existing frameworks is palpable and extends beyond legislation. In rewriting Interior Design Declares’ pledges and the BIID's Sustainable Specifying Guide, she is determined not to reinvent the wheel.
“There are so many frameworks that everything’s just lost within all these volumes of words. The challenge is curation and accessibility, not creation. Busy practitioners need signposting, not more documentation.”
The Trailblazer Problem and Why Design Must Reclaim Its Purpose
Our conversation ended on a question that neither of us could fully resolve: why, in an era of unprecedented connectivity, does the design industry seem to be lacking the bold, visionary champions it so desperately needs?
Anita and Gordon Roddick, who quietly rewrote The Body Shop's articles of association to include environmental and social impact alongside profit, some 25 years before B Corp existed, remains a model of what individual conviction can achieve. The Quakers, who built ethical supply chains and model communities in the nineteenth century, offer a longer historical parallel.
We need more of these ripples and more people actively making a difference. Not just a handful of instantly recognisable names like Patagonia for example, but a culture in which ethical practice is the norm rather than the exception.
For Chloe, that starts with reclaiming what interior design is. A former colleague once said to her that the profession had somehow become more about shopping: about taste and purchasing rather than skills in ergonomics, health and problem-solving. She finds that both recognisable and lamentable. Design, at its core, is about solving problems and finding beautiful solutions despite a project’s constraints. The challenges we face in our respective industries right now - of climate, toxicity, inequality and planetary limits - are the most important that designers have ever been required to engage with.
The tools exist. The knowledge exists. The frameworks, in many cases, already exist. What's needed is the will - individual, collective and legislative - to use them.