Water vessel
Water vessel, by Beatrix Ong, Lou Blackshaw and James Cropper
Alove of great white sharks spurred designer Beatrix Ong to sign up for an international marine volunteering programme in 2017. Ong, sustainability advocate and erstwhile creative director of Jimmy Choo, spent four weeks with the Dyer Island Conservation Trust in South Africa, learning about her favourite species but also rehabilitating wildlife that had suffered as a result of pollution. ‘It made me realise that humans are affecting the oceans in a drastic way. It’s one thing to look at data on plastic pollution. Holding an intoxicated penguin brings a whole new level of emotion,’ she recalls.
‘People have questioned how we even begin to reverse our impact on the environment. But I believe that bigger problems don’t have to be met with even bigger solutions. We can start with small changes.’
One change she firmly believes in is abandoning single-use plastic bottles for durable, and eventually biodegradable, water containers – like the vessel she created for Handmade, made of recycled coffee cup paper and inspired by a sea shell she’d collected in South Africa. It’s a project that takes wellness and wonder to an ecological level, championing not just individual wellbeing but the health of the planet.
For the material, Ong called on James Cropper, a specialist paper mill in England’s Lake District established in 1845. Now chaired by Mark Cropper, a sixth-generation member of the founding family, the company has stayed at paper’s cutting edge, producing coloured papers and 3D products for industries from luxury packaging and framing to digital imaging. It maintains a minimal environmental footprint by using renewable energy sources and leveraging the heat from the paper production process to warm its mill. Five years ago, it developed the world’s first industrial process to separate the plastic waterproofing from disposable coffee cups.
Cupcycling, as the process is called, uses a mix of mechanical and chemical means to separate cellulose fibres from the polyethylene lining, allowing the fibres to be recycled into new paper. Richard Burnett, who oversees the project, explains that they started with offcuts from the coffee cup manufacturing process. ‘Over time, we’ve developed relationships with retailers and waste management companies to start working with used cups,’ he says. ‘Our partners send lorry loads to us. Since last September we’ve taken 20 million cups, though we can accommodate about 500 million cups a year.’ At full capacity, James Cropper could handle 20 per cent of the cups thrown away in the UK annually.
Significantly, Cupcycling sends fibres into higherend products than they came from – shopping bags for luxury brands (Selfridges was an early adopter) and fine stationery, for instance. ‘Normally, fibre is downgraded every time it’s recycled,’ Burnett enthuses. ‘What we’re doing is different: we’re adding more value to the fibre.’
Ong’s water vessel uses the same ethos, taking a disposable typology and elevating it to something longer lasting. She sketched out an organic, spiralling, shell-like form – ‘so should it find itself in nature, it wouldn’t look out of place, unlike plastic bottles in the ocean’. The difficulty in realising this design was that paper only bends in certain ways. ‘What was missing was a translator to work in the language of paper.’ Enter Lou Blackshaw, an illustrator-turned-set designer who specialises in paper sculpture. Ong got in touch to explain that she was trying to create a shell shape out of paper. As it turned out, Blackshaw was acquainted with
the challenge, having made a shell sculpture from a single piece of paper in 2016 for a magazine cover.
The task became making a shell that doubled as an enclosed container. Ong and Blackshaw met at a hotel in London’s Mayfair, bringing along paper, scalpels and biodegradable glue for a day of experimentation. Blackshaw then continued to work on the form in her Gloucestershire studio, where Ong joined her weeks later to finalise the design. ‘We ended up creating the vessel out of eight elements,’ says Blackshaw. ‘Two for the inner core, two more that spiral around to form the handle, then one each for the top, base, spout and cap.’
The result is surprisingly robust, able to be carried around like a sports bottle. ‘When you cut paper on the bias, it takes on a completely different characteristic. It becomes incredibly sturdy,’ explains Ong.
The final hurdle came in the form of waterproofing. The coffee cup paper is water-resistant, but without a polyethylene layer, it wouldn’t hold water for long. Ong and Blackshaw’s solution was to line the inside of the vessel with beeswax. ‘That took us a few tries because the combination of beeswax and paper is highly combustible!’ laughs Ong. ‘But it worked.’
Shown at the Handmade exhibition in Milan, the water vessel is a demonstration of how a small gesture can help set our planet back on a positive course. For Ong, it’s just the start. Later this year, a similar vessel will feature in the first collection of her new venture, The Company of X, which will create zero-waste versions of products that usually ‘don’t love the planet’. ‘Once you start creating in this way, it’s hard to make a case for any other type of production,’ says Ong. ‘If you can make a range out of upcycled materials, and send them out in a bag that naturally decomposes and can be composted, why would you do it any other way?’∂