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The New Language of Materials

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We are witnessing an extraordinary time. The downfall of plastic as the default for everything has created a space, a vacuum, that ignites innovation.

But it isn't just the physical qualities and the make-up of materials that’s changing. Or even the provenance and the end of life possibilities. It is the LANGUAGE itself. This is the age of materials made from NUTRIENTS.

Nutrients that are borrowed from the bounty of Nature - agri-waste, plant matter, cellulose, proteins, fatty lipids and starches, names and words we already recognise. Usually when we take such ingredients, we put them through some kind of transformational stage where they become chemically modified. Once chemically modified they are no longer nutrients and they cannot go back to nature easily. They are no longer circular. But in the new material order, we do not chemically modify nutrients, we mix them, bake them, press them, mould them. They are nutrients throughout their entire life and they go back to Nature as nutrients.

THE FUTURE OF RECYCLING

We all know the illustration of the linear economy, the system we have been living within for the last 100 years - take, make, waste. We use 1.7 planet’s worth of natural resources every year, taking from the next generation to make the stuff of today. In the last six years, we have taken more natural resources than in the entire 20th century.

But we have woken up. We focus on the Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle. We talk about making materials circular, building a circular economy. We try to create as many iterations of the material use, often downcycling it, always having some element of wastage in the process. But however many loops we create, at the end of the day, it is still a line not an infinite circle. At the end of the day, there is still a bin.

Yet there is a different model to aim for. Nature has no waste. There is no bin. Everything is useful. Everything feeds the next cycle of growth. This is the only circular economy that makes real sense. That’s why we think the new language of nutrients is the answer. Not bio-based. Nutrient-based. Just actual nutrients that we recognise, that can go back to the soil as the feedstock for what’s next. Simply perfect.

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