Embassy of Rethinking Plastic at DDW
From floors to paint, from chairs to toothpaste, from the bricks on your doorstep to the plates in your cupboard. Many of the products in and around our home are made of recycled plastics, bioplastic or alternative, natural and renewable materials. You can see this in the Rethinking Plastic House at the Embassy of Rethinking Plastic, in Yksi Expo. At Dutch Design Week (DDW) you can experience how plastic contributes to sustainable living.
“We often see plastics as an environmental problem,” says Leonne Cuppen, curator of the Embassy of Rethinking Plastic. “But plastic actually also provides opportunities. But then we have to start looking at it differently.”
Conversation
This is why the Embassy of Rethinking Plastic brings together young designers and the industry. Together with the Brightlands Chemelot Campus in Sittard-Geleen, where companies and knowledge institutions work on high-quality circular materials, the Embassy is organising the Rethinking Plastic House event on 18 October, where designers and people from Brightlands will enter into discussion with each other.
“By bringing the two together, we want to accelerate the transition in thinking about and working with plastic,” says Cuppen. “There is a lot of creativity and the industry does want to change, but companies often don’t know how to. And how to get in touch with that creativity. We provide that bridge.”
100 different products
What this cooperation can ultimately deliver can be seen in the Embassy of Rethinking Plastic in Yksi Expo at Strijp-S, where the entire exhibition and other presentations can also be seen. In a completely furnished house of 50 square metres, 100 different products can be seen in which plastic has been handled differently. The floor, the paint, the lamps and even small accessories such as toothpaste tablets. The exterior also presents a different way of dealing with plastic. “You can see that in the lead substitutes, for example, but also in the cladding, the bricks, on the pavement in front of the house. Everything tells a story.”
The Embassy of Rethinking Plastic will have an extensive exhibition at DDW. Besides the Rethinking Plastic House, there is a main exhibition and the results of projects with partners such as TNO, Koning Willem I College, SintLucas and the Stokroos Foundation can be seen. For an overview of the programme, see the Embassy of Rethinking Plastic page.
The Embassy of Rethinking Plastic can be visited from 16 to 24 October at Yksi Expo at Strijp-S.