When Jaime and Isaac Salm launched Mio, their Philadelphia-based design firm in 2001, they proclaimed that “green was just a color.” But now their 6-person office has made a full on commitment to manufacturing sustain-able furnishings out of recycled paper and materials.

The two South American broth-ers are molding pulp into store displays, office seating, planters and partitions. Mio’s own Nomad wall system, with die-cut modular sections of recycled, double-walled cardboard is a big hit; clients and users say they love the fact they can customize the products. “Paper is more beautiful and more durable than people have given it credit for,” says Jaime. He predicts, “that while shiny things sell, soon the super high-end will look very eco.”

Mio isn’t alone in their optimistic pursuit of the green life. A new generation of designers, applying advanced technology to sustainable and responsible production, is taking advantage of the world’s growing surplus of recycled waste. And established global manufacturers are responding to these innovators’ proposals.

“We think of paper as wood,” explains Stephanie Forsythe, an architect and director at molo design, a 6-year-old design and production studio based in Vancouver, whose manufacturing network now extends as far afield as Taiwan. Ac-cording to the EPA, the aver-age American uses up approximately one 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree in paper and wood products per year. To create molo’s furniture out of kraft paper, Forsythe says, the designers have mixed new fiber with recycled content—“recycled fibers are shorter and chopped” and not as structurally sound as their freshly pulped counterparts and “100% recycled fibers tend to disintegrate,” she says. “So a blend with 50% of new longer fibers helps keep the product together.”

Perhaps the most prolific architect working in paper today is Japan’s Shigeru Ban. In 1995, he drew worldwide acclaim for creating PTS [Paper Tube Structures] as emergency housing after an earthquake devastated Kobe, Japan. On his simple structures, re-cycled cardboard tubes serve as load-bearing columns. Ban has built multiple buildings out of PTS, which are scattered around the globe in Germany, Turkey, Korea to Rwanda. In most cases, the tubes are “sourced locally” says architect Dean Maltz a collaborator from Ban’s New York office.

Other architects on the paper trail include Frank Gehry, who created his well-known card-board Wiggle chair in 1972. It remains in production; German furniture manufacturer Vitra has a Polish plant that glues together layers of the recycled cardboard. The Gehry paper products are even collectibles. Over the past couple of years, the Wiggle chair has sold for $1500 to $2500 at Rago Art and Auction Center in Lambertville, NJ where its value appears to be multiplying.

If Gehry’s undulating chairs were to morph into entire rooms, they would resemble the Flinders Lane store that Australian skincare line Aesop commissioned in 2007 from architects Rodney Eggleston and Anne-Laure Cavigneaux of March Studio in Melbourne. Along the shop walls, intricate layered shelving, stacked displays and countertops are all fashioned out of industrial strength cardboard that is structurally sound and recyclable. Over five days the shop was assembled by Eggleston and his staff out of 3,000 cardboard boxes and, although it retains a temporary look and feel, the shop interior remains intact.

Paper architecture’s many fans are now involving entire com-munities. In Brazil, artisan Domingos T�tora is working with the small agrarian community of Maria de Fe, training the locals to hand-craft his slatted, ribbed bowls out of pulp. The Brazilian artisans chop and mash kraft paper made from cardboard boxes, then hand-mold and sand the hardened pulp. The result is the Paper Rib Bowl which is being  launched this month as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Destination Brazil selling exhibition. According to Bonnie McKay, Director of the MoMA Design Store “the sculptural and organic forms are made from people whose hands are from the land. Who knows more about the earth than farmers?”

A further sign of pulp design’s increasing globalization can be found in Shanghai, where graphic designer Jethro Chan has launched a furniture and accessories brand called State. Made of recycled cardboard his “booklover friendly stacks with tilted zigzag shelves” and H chairs are incredibly afford-able and were recently exhibited at the Shanghai Lifestyle Fair last November.

His raw materials, though, come from close to home; China is the planet’s biggest manufacturer of corrugated board. Chan is planning to de-velop a research initiative with a local university and study the coun-try’s recycling habits. He’d like to place product in university housing, then monitor the lifecycle from design and sale through use, recycling, re-fabrication and resale. In discussing his plans Chan goes on to explain “the common goal of the 'study' is to contribute to environmental protection in China and for planet earth. I believe both a university and a business-like State should work together to set an example to inspire more people. In this case, government will definitely make a big difference.”

Statistics indicate that such initiatives could not have come too soon, since there’s ever more pulp to repurpose. According to the EPA, in 2007, paper and paperboard products accounted for about 83 million tons (33 percent) of all materials in the municipal waste stream. That same year, the U.S. recycled more than half (55 percent or 45 million tons) of all paper that Americans used—the result comes out to about 360 pounds of recycled pulp per person. So if everyone bought a cardboard chair or bowl or two a year, they would go a long way toward evening out their own personal score on the world eco-balance sheet.

Melissa Feldman is a freelance style and design editor who contributes to The New York Times' T Style magazine, Vogue, Manhattan Magazine, The Architects Newspaper, as well as her own blog strollthemagazine.com