RECYCLE

Hardly any material creates as great of an ambivalence in us as plastic. On the one hand, it is perceived as cheap, short-lived and environmentally unfriendly – and it is used that way. On the other hand, plastics and their processing methods have significantly shaped our consumer goods and thus our everyday life, because plastic is an extremely multifaceted, malleable and at the same time affordable material. Furthermore, plastic is futureoriented: it is potentially produced from alter-native raw materials, is in principle very easy to recycle and, with growing importance, is replacing rare materials in order to produce functional, for example, electronic components. In this project we devoted ourselves to the super normals, the simple, everyday, almost invisible commodities made of plastic, examined their necessity – also from a cultural perspective – and developed a next generation.
The key aspect lies in the recyclability and the design of material cycles. During the semester, we went through the entire design and development process right up to mass production in injection moulding from recycled plastics. For this we used the Precious Plastic Machines by Dave Hakkens.