Plain plastic

Johanna Seibert

MateriaalGreencast® gerecycled helder acrylaat

Plastics surround us everywhere in our everyday life – as wrappers, in the kitchen, the bathroom or in technical products. But why is it that plastics have such a bad reputation?
We associate them with low quality, environmental pollution and high CO2-emissions. However, plastics are highly specialized materials with countless variable features.
Concepts for bio-degradable and bio-based plastics or recycling are stretched to their limits, given we use plastic as a cheap throw-away product.
Maybe the problem is not plastics but how we deal with it? After all, the material it´s made from – mineral oil – is taken from nature just like gold or silver. If we use plastic we should appreciate the material for its special qualities like stability, lightness, colour and transparency.

As we should change our attitude towards plastic, the design process changed for this project, too. The focus of design was the inside of the material, not the outside as usual.
For plain plastic a block of acrylic glass is composed of various little parts. The light breaking on the edges of the little parts creates a pattern inside the block.
The jewelry is then cut form the block, trying to produce as little waste as possible.