A Dirty Secret
Neuman’s original series of lamps were produced as part of the Lens Light collection for Cubitt’s. (Photo: Mark Cocksedge)
In early 2020, when Jamie Marks took over two Iris Optical shops in Central London, his employees quickly noticed something: their new boss was obsessive about recycling. Since his teenage years, Marks had been the sorting sort, carefully separating paper from plastic from other nasties. And yet, even after more than 25 years in the eyewear industry, he realised he had a blind spot.
Producing a pair of eyeglasses is a particularly profligate process: cutting the frames out of a sheet of acetate leaves behind 80 per cent of the material. But that’s well-known in the business. The problem Marks had ignored was practically invisible: to put prescription lenses in, dummy lenses – the disposable ones used for demo purposes – have to go out.
But out where? On an average month, Marks says that just one of his shops chucks about 800 of those clear petal-like pieces. From the bin, these plastic parts either head to landfill or are burned, depending on whether they come from a small optical shop using normal waste disposal practices, or regional distributors with the ability to destroy them on their own. In this case, as lenses cannot be easily reused, recycled or reduced to productive bits, they often go up in flames, their toxic fumes a sign of our failure to devise a circular production process for the most widely used accessory in the world.
Like most people in his industry, Marks hadn’t questioned what happened to the dummy lenses after they left the premises. It took a cold call from Yair Neuman to break the news.
“[Jamie’s] not an activist in any way, but he’s a good optician and a successful businessman who is concerned about wasting material and polluting,” says Neuman, a London-based designer who has devoted his practice to finding ethical alternatives to problematic manufacturing, providing a path for people who aren’t necessarily design-obsessed or activists. Earlier in his career, this manifested in tongue-in-cheek projects such as suggesting stale bread as a substitute for wood in furniture and household objects, but he later devised a commercial venture: after working at Ron Arad’s PQ Eye wear company in the early 2010s, he envisioned a way to reframe the traditionally wasteful creation of a pair of shades. That research turned into Wires Glasses, an eyewear brand that produces sunglass and optical frames in Treviso from a single wire, while the lenses and rims are 3D-printed using a bioplastic extracted from castor beans. The wire solves the matter of the 80-per cent acetate residue, but dummy lenses are still needed. Dummy lenses are always needed.
Acetate, it turns out, can’t sit still. Similar to wood, it expands and contracts in accordance with humidity levels. That means that, lest they lose their shape from the factory to the shop, these living frames need a skeleton of sorts to keep their shape while in storage. There is, effectively, an actual functional need for temporary lenses.
There’s also a psychological one. “For some reason, the idea of trying on glassless frames makes us feel almost clownish,” Neuman explains. The dummy lenses are there to provide the most realistic preview possible and to assuage our fears of looking stupid. How about the people who don’t need corrective eyewear but like the way it looks on them? They would still need prescription lenses without focal correction, as dummy lenses are meant to be disposable and are not suitable for wear – although they are made from optical-grade polycarbonate, they are thin, scratch easily and can shatter into sharp pieces.
“For some reason, the idea of trying on glassless frames makes us feel almost clownish.”
The more he worked in the industry, the more Neuman realised that lenses are as large a polluter as frames. So he started contacting independent shops in London – including Iris Optical – and talking to the owners and the employees who either directly or unwittingly produced those bins full of dummy lenses. They would be the ones, he thought, to feel immediately preoccupied and guilty once they realised the scale of the problem. “People are feeling guilty,” he says. “They are the ones who put the plastic in the bin.” By relieving them from their waste, he found himself a constant and free supply of material to experiment with – Jamie Marks, for instance, remains a frequent provider.
One owner in particular was more than open to collaborating with Neuman on his experiments: Tom Broughton, the founder and CEO of Cubitts. This eyewear label does something seemingly counterproductive: it asks its customers to buy less. On average, optical eyewear users tend to buy new glasses every two years, but Broughton’s proposal is to repair them instead of throwing them away. The glasses, which retail for £125 in their acetate version, are designed using custom pins that allow for easy repair, and each Cubitts store has an on-site rehab workshop. This is, in other words, an industry-specific variation of the formula of buying good, buying once – and thus producing less waste. But Broughton still couldn’t find a suitable logistical response to the inevitable dummy lens waste his shops produced. “When you ask the question of what happens in other practices or labs, you realise you’ve uncovered a dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about,” he says. So, within the first five minutes of Neuman’s cold call, he invited the designer to meet and find a way to improve things together.
To create the forms, Neuman moulds the waste lenses by hand.(Photo: Sebastian Costa)
That collaboration resulted in an exhibition during the 2020 London Design Festival, where Neuman took his message public for the first time. Instead of removing traces of his material’s origins, he decided to let it speak for itself. “The project as a whole is very simple: taking the material and trying to do something with it,” he says.
Rather than grinding and recomposing the lenses into something unrecognisable, he used pressure, heat and a massaging technique that helps fuse the parts in spite of the repelling force of their anti-glare coating. Neuman then manually moulded the resulting fish-scale-like sheets into six lamps that were put on display at Cubitts’ Coal Drops Yard shop in King’s Cross. Half conceptual objects, half communication devices, the pieces in the Lens Light collection revealed their origin in a transparent way, forcing onlookers to confront uncomfortable information. Following the showcase, Neuman began receiving calls from small companies and opticians from the US and different parts of Europe who were interested in finding a better way to dispose of their dummy lenses. Logistically, it doesn’t pan out – at the scale at which Neuman is working, it’s more ethical to remain local to avoid the environmental impact of shipping waste internationally – but it does demonstrate the desire from individuals in the business to operate with a clearer conscience. At a company scale, however, things aren’t quite as straightforward.
The eyewear industry is extremely profitable. As LensCrafters co-founder Charles Dahan admitted to The Los Angeles Times in 2019, the markup on glasses can reach up to 1,000 per cent. The problem lies in the small number of hands that control a large part of the business. Take the multinational that owns LensCrafters, EssilorLuxottica – the result of a 2018 merger between two European giants. Essilor already controlled 45 per cent of the global lens market, while Luxottica was responsible for 25 per cent of the frame market. As Vox’s Chavie Lieber explained, together they’ve engulfed a vast portfolio of brands and lens and parts manufacturers and specialised assemblers, as well as more than 8,000 patents. Through its EyeMed Vision Care insurance, the group is connected to four out of every five optometrists in the US. In other words, it controls most of the global supply chain. If it says that a pair of prescription glasses that cost £20 to make can retail for £700, then so be it.
Some direct-to-consumer (DTC) challengers have been trying to lower that markup to fairer levels. One of the most well-known of these brands is Warby Parker, a New York-based company that has been offering optical eyewear at close to the £70 mark since 2010. And yet, according to Euromonitor, this year DTC companies are expected to take but a small 2 per cent bite out of the £102bn global eyewear market. The remaining 98 per cent have, for decades, largely stayed silent on the dummy lens environmental issue. “When I approached larger companies, I felt there was that [sense of] ‘We don’t want you to tell the story – that’s just going to surface things that we don’t want to speak about,’” Neuman remembers. Although some of those small DTCs, particularly in Europe, are starting to produce lenses from biomaterials, it sadly remains at a negligible scale due to the prohibitive cost of the processes involved. Many of the large optical companies have sustainability units and R&D departments focused on more environmentally viable long-term materials – when contacted, Luxottica was not able to provide information on its environmental practices – but the lack of public outcry has had the effect of moving those efforts down the list of priorities. To buy some time until this waste stream hits the news stream, the big eyewear players appear to be furthering an out of sight, out of mind approach. There has thus been no incentive, nor a margin-friendly solution, to do something about it.
Approximately four billion people use corrective eyewear. So why haven’t we, as consumers, been more keen to put two and two together, as has happened in small sections of the fashion industry? Although fashion remains highly polluting, it is now more aspirational for the informed consumer to purchase fair-trade clothes with a highly traceable supply chain than to buy from the likes of LVMH brands – to them, DIOP is far better than Dior. But even with the rise of eco-friendly fashion brands, designer handbags and high-street frocks are still seen as an act of frivolous conspicuous consumption, while optical eyewear is seen primarily as a necessity, a benevolent medical wearable. In fact, optical lenses and their frames are considered Class 1 medical devices in the European Union. Even the high price of a pair of spectacles is internally justified, often seen as a personal investment in a better quality of life. And no matter whether one pays £100 or £1,000 for a pair of specs, chances are they still produce the same amount of manufacturing waste. The difference in price is merely in the eye of the beholder – something that cannot be said about a Zara shirt and its Reformation counterpart.
“When you ask the question of what happens in other practices or labs, you realise you’ve uncovered a dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about.”
And yet, when you are taking dummy and obsolete prescription lenses into account, the optical industry discards some 210m units every year. At best, these pieces are burnt, but the majority are put into landfill, where they will spend some four centuries before they finally decompose.
Legislation might be an answer to this issue, although it takes time to come to the fore – in the US, for instance, Republican administrations have been known to favour employment numbers over what they see as job-killing regulations from the country’s Environmental Protection Agency. But even with a legal framework in place, some form of evasion is expected – since 1994, the European Commission has published reports on the thousands of non- conformity and bad application cases in the oldest 15 states of the Union. As Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions cheating scandal proved, companies – particularly large ones – can often find a way around strictures that may curtail profit margins. Or, as Cubitts’ Tom Broughton puts it, “regulation is too easy to skirt.” At this stage of the dummy lens problem, where most consumers are unaware of the effect of such a commonplace purchase, time is a luxury that should not be afforded.
So others have started taking matters into their own hands, with some manufacturers creating recycling programmes for eyewear professionals and optical retailers. Florida’s Costa Del Mar was founded in 1983 by a fishing enthusiast and acquired by Essilor in 2014. Since 2015, it has run the Kick Plastic programme, which has turned more than 44,000lbs of lenses into objects such as scuba masks and motorcycle helmet shields. If this proves replicable and cost-effective – a particular challenge, since its parent company recently laid off 295 of Costa’s 350 employees and will move its operations to Luxxotica’s plants in New York and California – it could represent one path towards a more efficient use of resources. But this might not be circular enough: can divers and motorcycle riders be a source for informed change within an industry they may not necessarily participate in? In order for optical eyewear consumers to demand change from manufacturers, they may need a more direct relation in the resulting recycling. The perfect object, just like Neuman’s lamps, would visually communicate its material origins in order to raise further awareness. During the early stages of reusable bag adoption, some manufacturers used to print slogans such as “I used to be 50 soda bottles” on totes. Similarly with eyewear, early-stage objects need to be directly linked to glasses just to communicate the existence of the issue. A first wave of informed customers, usually early adopters and trendsetters, can lead to mass adoption in a few decades – or now, thanks to social media, in a few years. While the fashion industry still hasn’t experienced a widespread rejection of ecologically taxing clothes, there is frequently a sense of guilt among those who purchase fast fashion. And guilt often leads to change, however long it takes. “In my experience, guilt is there all the time,” Neuman says.
Neuman photographed outside of the Cubitt’s Coal Drops Yard store. (Photo: Mark Cocksedge)
Fittingly, he is now working on an object to meet these requirements. The same anti-reflection coating that made dummy lenses difficult to bind together with heat to create his lighting pieces also produces a welcome result when the surface of the coating is broken: an iridescent, nacre-like pattern. When layered to form a sheet about a third of an inch thick, the pattern becomes three-dimensional, almost like a bubble-coloured tortoiseshell that shines with greens and blues and purples. And, of course, that sheet can be used to close the loop to create frames, at a rate of 50 demo lenses per unit. “In a way, it’s a nice concept, because you need a lot of rubbish to create a little product,” Neuman says.
As sociologist Ana Andjelic explained in her newsletter, The Sociology of Business, intellectual flexing is a consumer driver. “The purpose of flex commerce is to establish one’s status as distinct and superior to others,” she wrote in December 2020. “Unlike other forms of commerce, it’s unrelated to the cost of goods and services, but to their intangible, symbolic value.” The pearlescent pattern in Neuman’s frames could be an easily recognisable signal of moral flexing, and thus a probable hit with the DTC audience. But he’s looking further ahead, seeing the limitations of preaching to the choir. “It’s good to make fashionable eyewear sustainable, but there’s more than that: the little brands, that I’m a part of, are catering to the people who are already convinced that sustainability is the way forward,” he explains. “If you want this process to realistically work in big quantities, you need larger facilities, and I really believe those big players can make that happen.”
In other words, our current troublemakers hold the key to a possible win-win solution. On the one hand, large companies can clean up their act by cleaning up our landfills. On the other, consumers can affordably purchase a mass-produced plastic element that defies the historical behaviour of mass-produced plastic, and can set a positive standard in other industries. When fashion designer Anya Hindmarch released her “I am not a plastic bag” canvas tote in 2007, 80,000 shoppers queued to buy their own at Sainsbury’s on launch day. To many, it was a chance to get their hands on an original Hindmarch bag for £5, with the design’s environmental message new to most. What started as Hindmarch’s personal concern turned into a PR coup that ignited a global debate, and became one of the elements that led to a present where urban dwellers carry foldable reusable bags with them, and many supermarket chains around the world have stopped providing plastic bags for free –or at all. If personal concern from a designer can produce an attractive object that gets media attention, then it may lead to public debate and more informed consumers who can influence the decisions of large companies. So go ahead.
Words Rab Messina
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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