The Beauty Of Upcycling

Design and sustainability can work hand-in-hand as shown by these Singaporean designers, who exhibited at the Emerge showcase at FIND: Design Fair Asia.

- LUO JINGMEI

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”.