In an effort to reduce its environmental impact, Ikea, the world’s largest furniture retailer, has developed a new range of products made from recycled waste materials. For the 2019 edition of its PS collection, design teams for the furniture and home accessories giant worked from the factory floor. This enabled them to observe and better understand production processes, techniques and materials, in order to then experiment with and tweak them for greater efficiency and sustainability.
Designers recycled waste generated from packaging and manufacturing to create new items, such as furniture made from PET plastic bottles and marbled vases made with defective glass. In a time of resource scarcity, the inventive use of waste materials and once-overlooked manufacturing by-products is set to increase. The race to zero – zero waste, that is – has begun.