“Green,” or environmentally friendly, design – once something of a fringe pursuit – is arguably the hottest trend in the design world today. Major design fairs regularly feature special exhibits on the topic, and many designers now strive to include words like “sustainable,” “natural,” and “locally sourced” when describing their work.

So the students at Parsons School of Design must have been pleased to be approached this year to create a line of dinnerware and glassware for possibly the greenest group of all, the Sierra Club.

Parsons, as it happens, already had a program set up for just such an occasion, the Parsons Design Lab. Each lab lasts one semester and brings together a group of undergraduates, Parsons faculty, and a corporation (or nonprofit entity like the Sierra Club) that brings to the table a specific design assignment and a grant of an undisclosed sum.

Previous Design Lab projects have included collaborations with Diesel, Siemens, and Fossil. This year’s student designs were such a hit with the Sierra Club that the company is pushing to get the student prototypes into production, the first time this has happened, the director of the Parsons Design Lab, Carol Moore, said.

The students’ creations include “Growth” dinnerware, which reproduces cellular structure on the face of the plates; “Heritage” dishes, which “recycle” traditional English-style china patterns in new, arresting configurations; and my favorite, “Roots,” in which a single, twisting root or branch snakes across dinner plate, salad plate, and bowl, creating a unified table-setting from the diner’s perspective.

“I’m so thrilled with them, I can’t even begin to tell you,” the director of the Sierra Club’s licensing program, Johanna O’Kelley, said. Ms. O’Kelley approached Parsons because she was tired of seeing “tabletop” – industry jargon for the plates, glass, and objects that go on top of your table – that had “no originality.” After attending a green design conference in New York City last year, she approached Parsons with the idea of having students work on the project. “And they really nailed it – all the way down,” Ms. O’Kelley said of the collaboration. “The designs are new and original and fresh.” The students ordinarily don’t get paid for their work, but this semester, the Sierra Club offered the students an additional end-of-semester grant for their exemplary work, in addition to the money that goes to the school, according to Ms. Moore.

It’s unclear yet, Ms. O’Kelley said, whether Sierra Club will convince licensers to pick up the student designs, but she’s aiming for retail distribution in such mainstream venues as Macy’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Sales of the product lines would help fund the Sierra Club’s various programs, though Ms. Moore is quick to point out that the students still own “intellectual property rights” of their designs and so will be paid if they are actually produced. But the real boon, Ms. Moore said, is that students learn early that design is really a marriage of art and commerce, and not just, as Ms. O’Kelley put it, “gee-doesn’t-this-look-cool stuff.”