With China recently announcing their disinterest in continuing playing the role of recycling receptacle for the West, discarded plastics are fast becoming a looming issue for economies and industries built around the convenience of single use, disposable materials. Brighton-based design studio Gomi proposes a small, but beautiful solution for what to do with discarded plastics, turning waste into want.
The lovely marbled design of the Gomi Speaker is the colorful melange of non-recyclable flexible plastic waste derived mostly from plastic bags, converted into malleable raw material swirled and shaped into the exterior housing for the company’s Bluetooth speaker. The speaker is made from three modular marbled-plastic components, and is made using a combination of traditional craft techniques and digital fabrication. The speakers are hand-marbled, which means that every product has its own individual aesthetic. Each speaker takes equivalent of 100 plastic bag worth of flexible plastics to make.
Gomi was co-founded by Tom Meades, Sustainable Designer and Maker based in Brighton. “We were inspired by the cradle-to-cradle design process, thinking about our products full-lifecycle right from the beginning of our design process. With our bluetooth speakers, we want to intercept a waste stream that would otherwise be landfilled or incinerated. Flexible plastics / LDPE is widely regarded as non-recyclable by UK councils, and so we thought this would be the perfect material to harness and show that through innovative design this can be valuable, and does not have to end up as waste polluting our environment. Instead, we can craft this material into desirable objects.”
Gomi is on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter right now to expand the scale of the project. You can back them here.
from Design MilkDesign Milk https://design-milk.com/100-plastic-bags-are-recycled-into-one-of-these-beautiful-wireless-speakers/
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