Waste materials and byproducts are given a new life at these three Singapore design studios

The world of design celebrates craft, creation, and concepts that aim to improve our ways of life, but the recent debate on sustainability has highlighted the negative impact of all this “making” that has become tangible with climate change.

In Singapore, the government, and some businesses and manufacturers attempt to tackle the topic, but many challenges remain, including consumer resistance. Still, this hasn’t stopped local designers from finding their own ways to address the issue. 

Plastic is forever

At FIND: Design Fair Asia, a furniture and interiors trade fair held at Marina Bay Sands in September this year, Karyn Lim, who runs her eponymous design studio as well as co-runs furniture brand IndustryPlus, showcased the So Plast!c collection of tables at the Emerge showcase. It’s an exhibition of Southeast Asian designers curated by Suzy Annetta, the editor of Design Anthology magazine.

The PP and HDPE plastics used to make the tables were sourced from food and drink packaging waste, hangers, and buckets. “So Plast!c was inspired by plastic’s ubiquity and versatility, celebrated as ‘the material of a thousand uses’ when it was first invented in the early 1900s. I wanted to harness the potential of plastic waste as permanent pieces of design art for homes and commercial spaces instead of being discarded into landfills,” explains Lim. 

The colours come from the waste themselves; no additional colouring or materials are mixed in to keep the plastic recyclable. Lim also designed the tables to be flat-packed “to leave a smaller carbon footprint during transportation”.

She’s no stranger to addressing environmental issues in her designs. There was the OMO bag in 2016, designed together with Yogyakarta-born architect Fani Atmanti and made from wood upcycled from the renovation of homes in Nias, Indonesia.

Lim also expanded the So Plast!c series into vessels made from used plastic grocery bags. “I would potentially like to work with brands to use waste collected from their products’ life cycles, or alternative sources, to create customised pieces for their retail spaces,” she shares.

Keeping it local

Studio Gin&G has done just this; creating bespoke elements for the spaces they design. Founded by Genevieve Ang and Georgina Foo in 2021, who met in architecture school, the studio displayed the “Chance” wall lamp collection made from upcycled offcut sheet glass waste. The organically shaped luminaires, layered with differently treated glass, glowed like translucent sculptures.

“The term ‘offcut’ refers to leftover materials that are often too small and irregular in dimensions to be used productively as building materials, and are typically deemed construction waste bound for the landfill,” explains Ang. 

The project is a derivative of her research project “Other Supply”, which studies the transformation of glass waste into glazes. “Other Supply” is supported by The Good Design Research Grant, which is funded by the Design Singapore Council. 

The duo started their experimentation when they designed FURA, a plant-forward bar and restaurant founded by chef Christina Rasmussen and mixologist Sasha Wijidessa.

An earlier version of the lamps that adorn the FURA’s walls embodies the establishment’s sustainable approach. The glass waste was repurposed by local glass supplier Synergraphic Design, who also helped the designers source Bio-Glass (made from 100 per cent recycled glass) to make FURA’s bar countertop.

In more recent work, Studio Gin&G inserted broken ceramic tiles upcycled from a previous project into jewellery atelier Curious Creatures’ ION Orchard store flooring. They also partnered with local waste-based materials supplier Tesign to develop a surface top material for the cashier counter of the new Suntec City store of homegrown fashion label Y21, made out of 751 post-consumer, locally recycled plastic bottles. 

“It was important to us that these experiments could be explored locally so as to engage the local industry and upcycle local waste,” says Foo, who adds this is not without its challenges given that developing waste-based materials is still new in Singapore. It usually means the studio has to go through painstaking explorations to create prototypes, as they cannot buy materials off the shelf. 

Education is key

A third local designer who exhibited at Emerge was Nathan Yong, who showed a 3D-printed concrete bench. “I worked with a local company, CES Innovfab, that uses ‘fly ashes’ — a byproduct of burning pulverised waste into their cement mixes that uses less granite and upcycles rubbish in the process,” says the pioneer of local design, who also runs furniture retailer Grafunkt. 

His earlier Bent Onyx collection marries art and function and uses patented technology to reduce waste during the production process, allowing the onyx blocks to be sliced thinly into sheets before being laminated.

Despite these projects, Yong does not want to label himself as a sustainable designer. Many businesses parade themselves as green companies but fail to evoke effective change. “I believe instead in educating the younger generation so they will make informed choices in their purchases or become an advocate because businesses will change only through demand from the ground up,” explains Yong, who also teaches product design at Lasalle College of the Arts.  

A more efficacious way is to design so that products have a longer shelf life. “One of the reasons our natural resources are depleting is due to the over- or repetitive consumption of things made of (poor) quality,” says Yong. “If we make things that last longer, with better construction, and are more meaningful to own, then we will give time for the earth to grow or regenerate healthily.” 

Small steps

They all agree that there is a long way to go to change mindsets and rid sustainable design of its novelty. “Sustainable design tends to come at a premium, and this is probably the greatest barrier to entry in getting the mass market to adopt sustainability as a lifestyle,” Lim points out.

It’s nevertheless heartening to see local designers take the initiative to make small waves of change in hopes that one day the tide will turn in favour of Mother Gaia.