Noemi Florea: Filtering for Sustainability
Cycleau Sanitation
As the COVID-19 pandemic surged in June 2020, BA Environmental Studies/BFA Integrated Design dual-degree student Noemi Florea sought to apply the lessons in design thinking, sustainability, and economics she has been studying at Parsons and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts to the global health crisis. “The pandemic really magnified the amount of waste in our system right now,” she says.
Florea began designing with an ambitious goal in mind: to develop a new system to conserve resources. Her solution was Cycleau Sanitation, a compact non-electrical device that sanitizes PPE, washes household items, and uses water four times before disposing of it. Instead of requiring a pump to circulate the water and cleaning solution, Cycleau Sanitation uses the air pressure created by filling the tank to force fluids through narrow tubes connecting the device’s three chambers. The filtration system makes the water and cleaning solution reusable, saving users money while encouraging them to wash items more frequently.
The BA/BFA program has enabled Florea, now in her fourth year, to explore sustainability with the faculty and curricular resources of both Parsons and Lang while pursuing a minor in economics. The interdisciplinary approach has helped her understand the ways water scarcity, inaccessibility, and unaffordability directly affect the health and economic well-being of millions of Americans.
To create a prototype of Cycleau Sanitation that can be mass-produced locally, Florea is collaborating with several of her New School professors, including Gary Chwatuk, Raz Godelnik, and Leonardo Helland; engineers at the University of Maryland and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands; and city partners in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Flint, Michigan. The progress makes her hopeful about the device and its potential for fostering healthy and sustainable cities. “Designers are being taught how to think differently,” Florea says, “to imagine different scenarios and be creative about developing systems and thinking about the products and services within those systems.”
