Finnish design profile and Senior Lecturer at LAB, Susanna Björklund, had an idea, that the LAB Institute of Design and Fine Arts would create a sustainability exhibition for the country’s leading design event, Habitare. She reached out to the second-, third-, and fourth-year students at the Lahti-based design school’s various design-related departments.
— We only had a headline for the exhibition, the idea of the entire concept came from the students, she explains.
Around 20 of them have worked on creating six different materials from waste streams, which was presented in the Fluxion exhibition at Habitare during last week’s Helsinki Design Week.
— We have picked up very common materials and how to make a new material of it to use in new products. The products are more conceptual rather than ’real’ ones, and some are more like art pieces, says Harri Kalliomäki, who also works as a Senior Lecturer at LAB.
— We’re also trying to show the process behind creating the material, says Björklund. Otherwise, it can be quite vague to show a product made of, for instance, dog hair.
In one concept, student Mikael Kangas started thinking about how to find a new use for coffee. When brewing it, less than one per cent of the beans end up in the liquid, and coffee consumption worldwide produces 6-8 million tons of waste per year. In Finland, coffee accounts for 13% of the total amount of food waste generated but can have many other uses, such as soil improvement, a raw material for bioenergy, or oil for the cosmetics industry. Or in interior design.
— It’s now become a leather-like material sample used on a chair, Kalliomäki explains.
Hair and fur waste is produced in hundreds of tons per year and almost everything is incinerated in the mixed waste. In the exhibition, Mea Aura created Sisätyyny — a prototype of an alternative pillow filling made using dog hair — and Kaisa Vulli designed an art piece with it. Human and animal hair have many useful properties; it can absorb a significant amount of oil and has been used to clean up oil spills, to reinforce concrete in the construction field (since it has the same tensile strength as copper wire), and can be used in fertilising plants.
— I think it (Sisätyyny, Ed’s note) feels quite nice, Susanna Björklund shares.
In Finland, 75 kilos of biowaste is generated per year per inhabitant and even more would be generated if sorted correctly, to be used for biofuels — or refined into even higher value products. As part of the Fluxion exhibition, students Oona Rantamäki and Linda Paananen have created a lamp made of orange peel.
— In the exhibition, several of our students have also worked with our startup t:42, which works to develop the recipes created from the waste streams, build up and grow the business, and go through all of the tests, says Kalliomäki.
— Basically, we could use all of these materials and scale them. But then you need time. And you need funding. But somewhere, the ideas have to come up! Björklund adds.
Also featured in the exhibition are products made of mash, produced as a side stream in the manufacturing process of beer and distilled spirits. 40 million tons of mash is produced every year only during beer production and is used a lot, especially as animal feed and bioenergy. It has also been used in the production of paper and cardboard and as a raw material for grain products.
— This material comes from a beer brewery and so far, they have burned it, Kalliomäki shares. Now, it’s a stool by Mikael Kangas that is still quite fragile — we have to develop this recipe.
The students have also experimented with lignin and sawdust. The wood industry produces a significant amount of side streams at different stages of the manufacturing processes, such as sawdust and wood chips. Various wood-based products such as plywood and chipboard have been processed from these for a long time but the resin adhesives used in gluing veneers are toxic and cause pollution. Lignin, on the other hand, is a tree-specific binder that holds the plant cell together. Most of the lignin produced is currently burned for energy. By using lignin as a binder in wood products, LAB explains, an emission-free and completely natural product can be created.
— Ava by Jesper Hauhtonen is a zero-chip board and the colour comes from lignin, says Kalliomäki.
”We are not using the word ’sustainable’ any more — it’s inside the process”
It’s a sign of the times that the students are doing this now, of course. It can also be a competitive advantage when they’re entering work life, to have experienced such a rather unconventional process.
— Yes, that’s true and having worked from scratch with the whole process is key, says Björklund.
— We are not using the word ’sustainable’ any more. I think that it’s inside the process. We think that it’s obvious — we don’t have to use the word, Kalliomäki adds.
With the lamp FBM-01, student Aleksi Peltonen illustrates the properties of materials — in this case, mycelium composite — that could replace traditional mould-formed materials.
— We also have an experiment in our school where the students are developing 3D printable mycelium, says Kalliomäki.
When working with such projects, it’s easy to take things for granted; if you’re working in the creative sectors, you might think that you’ve seen everything before.
— But then, a lot of the visitors who come here to Habitare haven’t. That’s why it’s really important to do these things — and to visualise the whole process when doing it. You get so much bad news about climate change and waste problems. A lot of people know about the facts, but I think we need encouragement. This is what this exhibition is trying to be, says Björklund.
— If we take the ’coffee leather’ — in our minds, it’s not so special, says Kalliomäki. But when we tell the people who come here to not throw away their coffee, because they may make leather-like material out of it, the reaction is, ’What?!’. When they see these examples, they start thinking about other clever ideas. So, what might be familiar materials for us, is also important to show to as many people as possible.
If you would take this one step further, which materials are you the most curious of?
— Materials that are not here yet. Materials that we haven’t seen. New amazing innovations are born all the time if you keep your eyes open, Björklund states.
— I know quite a lot about wood materials. I would like to try to do a combination of cellulose and lignin and mould it. I think that it’s not so clever that always when we are using lignin and the wooden chip, we are making boards. Yes, it is a solution, but what would happen if we started producing, for instance, egg packaging of it? Made of cellulose and using special moulds, and that’s it. Nothing else. Now, I am trying to find out how strong it could be, Kalliomäki says. He adds:
— I have a dream, to make a road bicycle out of this material. And you may be using very organic shapes, which gives strength without weight, so it would be very light and very strong. But let’s see. Maybe next year.
