Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure
Vessels and Side Tables by featured designer Charlotte Kidger
“This is a book about waste — about the coffee grounds your barista throws away; about the plastic swept off the floor of the recycling centre to which you dutifully send your empties; about the denim offcuts that didn’t even make it into your jeans. Ultimately, a book about waste is a book about everything.” – Katie Treggiden
Hembury chair by featured designer Solidwool
In her new book, award-winning craft and design writer Katie Treggiden takes the all-consuming topic of waste — the mother of all environmental problems — and reveals how it could instead become the raw material of the future. Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure celebrates 30 pioneering designers, makers, and manufacturers who are exploring the potential of waste as their primary resource, turning the end-point of the current linear ‘take-make-waste’ model into the starting point for new, meaningful, and long-lasting products. In a series of essays and profiles, Treggiden offers a rare and hopeful glimpse into the emerging world they inhabit.
Treggiden provides in-depth insight into how objects and materials that were once useful and valued, become redefined as waste, and end up in landfill sites emitting hazardous greenhouse gases, or in the world’s oceans polluting marine life.
With a foreword by respected craft, design history, and contemporary art curator and writer, Glenn Adamson, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure features an accessible, erudite and personal introduction that provides a fresh perspective on the topic of waste, setting up the scale of the problem and providing context for the book. Five chapters, each dedicated to a different ‘family’ of waste, follow. The first chapter explores the things we all throw away every day – domestic or consumer waste – followed by industrial and ‘pre-consumer’ waste and then three more specifically problematic cases from within those broader streams — fashion, food, and plastic waste. Each chapter opens with an introductory essay exploring the societal, cultural and environmental context, before celebrating the people and projects transforming materials found within these waste streams into newly valuable objects.
The New Age of Trichology by featured designer Sanne Visser
The makers Treggiden profiles in each chapter are more interested in the patina of age than the shock of the new, more motivated by feeling responsible than by feeling rich, and would rather imagine a new life for something that has been discarded than simply throw it away. As featured Belgian designer, Charlotte Jonckheer says, ‘It is our task as designers to create responsible products that are attractive to the consumer. I am fascinated by the reasons we are drawn to some objects or materials and repulsed by others. I believe there is an incredible beauty in waste materials...’
Using materials from old sports shoes and industrial chocolate moulds to human hair, the makers featured in Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure regard waste as far more than simply an abundant and environmentally responsible material, but something that offers the opportunity to fundamentally change the culture.
While the projects featured within Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure may not offer the solution to ‘the mother of all environmental problems’ what they might do, together with the essays that accompany them, is present a different perspective. If they can inspire us all to think a little differently, perhaps we can move towards a thriving circular economy that fulfils the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. One person’s trash could indeed become another’s treasure.
A must read available to buy here
Bahia Slate Table by featured designer Sophie Rowley