Today’s furniture is designed to be accessible, trendy, and cheap: but what happens when it breaks? Most of the furniture is made of hard-to-recycle, toxic materials. Hard-to-recycle means that waste furniture will not be taken apart and will often ends up in landfills or incinerators, resulting in the further damaging of our environment. Besides the environmental burden this brings, it also disconnects us from the potential value of discarded objects. By rethinking how we deal with discarded furniture, waste could be turned into a valuable resource, pollution prevented, and the life of objects extended.
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NeighbURWOOD tackles this problem by doing just this: turning waste into resources. By using the Material Driven Design method, the team created a bio-based veneer-paste from local tree-bark waste, by iterating on the ingredients in the paste. The ingredients used are filler, plasticizers, binders and liquids. This paste is then used to be applied to furniture pieces, giving them a new, authentic aesthetic, and old furniture design a new life.
Beyond the material itself, the team designed a circular upcycle workflow that ties into the municipal plans of Utrecht for waste reduction and upcycling. This integration aims to show that the concept has the potential to be implemented at the neighbourhood level and scaled to other neighbourhoods. And shows the potential of upcycling to different municipalities in the Netherlands.
Together, the material and workflow create a system in which waste is collected, repaired, and upcycled locally and reintroduced into the local community.
Neighbourwood shows that sustainable solutions can be local and creative. By creating a place-based upcycle workflow, a community can be brought together and create a playground for material development and upcycling, stimulating local circular economies while reducing municipal waste. Limitations of this project remain in the scale of production and the active involvement of stakeholders so far. However, the project presents an actionable path forward and helps shift society away from a throwaway culture to a more circular one.
