Sustainability is a complicated, sometimes paradoxical concept. It’s why you’re better off buying a used gas car than a new Tesla, and should consider buying that shrinkwrapped banana rather than nature’s own.
With that in mind, perhaps the disposable CasusGrill ($8) really isn’t so bad, either. Seemingly designed with Bjarke Ingel’s philosophy of sustainable hedonism–the idea that sustainable design can actually “increase the quality of life”–at its core, the CasusGrill is a one-use grill that’s about as large as a medium-sized pizza. It assembles like a little jigsaw puzzle, burns hot for an hour, and then? You can throw it away, or conceivably, just bury it. No guilt required.
Compared to a disposable aluminum grill, which would take 400 years to break down if it weren’t recycled, there seems to be little contest, even when it comes to fire quality. Those evenly spaced charcoal briquette disks? They’re far more geometrically efficient for distributing heat than dumping charcoal into a container would be. So you can get by with less charcoal. Sustainably speaking, that matters: our tendency to use too much charcoal is one reason why, in yet another sustainability paradox, gas grills are cleaner than natural charcoal ones.
The CasusGrill is on pre-order now for a mere $8. Hopefully it arrives before the summer is over.