Design and engineering students in Aalto University’s CHEMARTS programme have built a concept pram with the Dutch maker Bugaboo, using seven experimental materials. The canopy is made from orange peel. The light back panel comes from sawdust. The seat cushioning uses recycled egg-carton fibre and a starch-based foam, and a blanket is woven from hemp and lignin, the substance that binds wood together. A bio-based tar coating gives the seat material its surface and its smell.
A pram was chosen because a single object has to hold rigid structures, soft foams, textiles and weatherproof surfaces at once. Professor Tiina Nypelö compares it to a concept car: not a product, but a visible version of a possible material future. Some of it could be in everyday products by 2040, she says. The hard part is not inventing the material but building the system around it — where the peel is collected, how it travels, at what scale.
So…:
What waste passes through your business that someone else would call a raw material?
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Picture:
Aalto University (press) // Esa Kapila