How Designers Transforming Industrial Waste Into Object Of Beauty

Is it denim or marble? Algae or glass? How a new group of designers is resurrecting once-discarded materials.

- Gisela Williams

In 2016, Sophie Rowley quit her job in London sourcing textiles for the designer Faye Toogood’s fashion line to work with a decidedly less desirable material: industrial garbage. At the Mumbai innovation center of one of India’s largest manufacturing firms, Godrej & Boyce, which produces everything from submarine parts to padlocks, Rowley joined a small team of designers tasked with catalouging every waste product the corporation produced, then recruiting local craftspeople to experiment with the discarded materials: She gave old raffia to rattan artisans, who wove it into chairs; disused copper wire went to ceramists, who crocheted it into patterns to adorn their pottery. ‘‘The quantity of waste is beyond comprehension,’’ Rowley says. ‘‘The workers were using up to 30,000 pairs of gloves each month.’’

Despite all this trash, Rowley was ultimately galvanised by the experience. After moving back home to Berlin in the summer of 2017, she started building an archive of novel materials that she’d been tinkering with earlier that decade, during her student days at London’s Central Saint Martins. At first glance, some of these experiments appeared like natural substances: a block of ‘‘coral’’ carved from discarded blue foam, recycled glass melted down and transformed into something that resembled a ghostly glacier. But her most successful project was more surreal: Bahia Denim, a sturdy textile fabricated from leftover pieces of jeans, moulded and bonded using bioresin, then cut into flat sheets that mimicked indigo-hued marble, which could later be formed into stools, tables and other furnishings. ‘‘The ultimate goal,’’ she says, ‘‘is to out-design waste.’’