NEW YORK—With the future of the design industry — and the economy as we know it — hinging on consumers continuing to shop, journalists-cum-curators Dan Rubinstein and Jen Renzi see the dangers of a green scene that rejects wastefulness in favor of permanence. So they decided to change the dialogue by creating an event where designers make products that are both sustainable and disposable.

Self-proclaimed “jaded and cynical journalists,” Rubinstein and Renzi know that green is the concept du jour, but they believe it is human nature to throw out the old to make room for the new. While they were hashing out some of these ideas, a lightbulb went off, and the pair sent a brief to their favorite designers and artists (and some they’d always dreamed of meeting) to create original, eco-friendly, and disposable products and designs.

Hence, the birth of “InDisposed,” a not-for-profit exhibition taking place in New York this week during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, with the aim of creating a dialogue around sustainability and wastefulness. The exhibition itself has a small financial footprint: All of the works were donated by the 15 participating artists and designers, and the space was donated by SoHo’s Studio-X, a studio for design and research run by Columbia University.

The green movement seems based on an anti-waste sentiment that makes consumers feel bad about consuming, says freelance writer Renzi. “But if we don’t throw away, we won’t buy new things.”

Rubinstein, a senior editor at Surface magazine, takes it one step further. “If we all bought one thing and never replaced it, what would the world look like?”

The designers and artists were given the latitude to create art or conceptual objects in a variety of media — anything that spoke to the idea of disposability.

Atema Architecture, a New York-based design team that was started in 1998 by Frank Gehry alumnus Ate Atema, began with the question “Why can’t a table eat itself?” — and came to the realization that it can. Their Auto-Cannibalistic Table is made of egg cartons, flour paste, soil, and seeds, and when water is added the seeds germinate and the table literally consumes itself. “So one day there will only be dirt left in your living room where the table once was,” Renzi jokes.

A few participants decided to make works out of trash, like Redstr/Collective VS Kao — a collaboration between New York husband-and-wife team Alex Valich and Christine Warren (Redstr) and Chris Kao, a designer for Santiago Calatrava Architects — which made CAMPstyle Lounge Chair out of salvaged construction materials.

Other designers created nonfunctional objects that spoke to the idea of waste, such as Brooklyn duo Design Glut (Kegan Fisher and Liz Kinnmark), who made power strips out of resin with plug-in resin candles to highlight the wastefulness of so-called “vampire devices” — appliances, such as your television or hair dryer, that consume electricity even when they are turned off.

Other artists were more interactive. New York artist Adrian Kondratowicz, working under Adrian K, is presenting Trash: anycoloryoulike, an “art intervention for urban beautification and environmental awareness” that has transformed piles of trash around New York with the use of colorful, patterned trash bags, starting in 2008. An accompanying video shows how awareness of garbage is heightened when the bags are not your standard-issue black.

At the end of "InDisposed," all of the projects will be sent to the trash as a testament to the designers’ belief in disposability.

InDisposed is on view at Studio-X at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610 in SoHo, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Wednesday.