After Plastic
Sony is well aware of its own wastage. Electronic devices are the world’s fastest growing waste stream: in 2019, 53.6m metric tons of e-waste were produced worldwide, up from 33.8m in 2011. The myriad goods Sony manufactures and distributes also generate immense waste through packaging and emissions. Parallel to its Road to Zero ambitions, the corporation plans to eliminate all waste by 2050.
The scale of the problem is scary (see Disegno #30 for how the Ghana is bearing the brunt of the world’s e-waste crisis), but there’s hope in the solutions. Waste Age, the Design Museum’s exhibition on the crisis on the ravages of our throw-away society, ended on a note of hope. Sony’s immersive installation Life from Light placed visitors in a computer generated forest. As they moved around, light cast on life forming on the forest floor, such as fungi. The more people visit together, the brighter the light. By working in unity, Sony wants to say, we can create new life.
When Sony was originally commissioned by the museum’s chief curator Justin McGuirk, its designers had a rather different installation in mind. Placed at the exhibition’s outset, it would stamp the minds of visitors with the scale of the waste crisis. “We wanted to show how our lives will be impacted by the waste," says Hirotaka Tako, creative director of Sony Design Centre Europe. “How the waste is going to eat you.”
It would have certainly been dramatic, but Life from Light offers a vision of a more radical future than a simply doomed one. One route to not getting swallowed up by waste is to replace plastics with a new generation of innovative yet sustainable materials. Sony has engineered two in recent years, both of which it displayed as part of Waste Age. The first is Triporous: a filtering material created from discarded rice husks. It was created almost by accident, as a by-project of engineer Seiichiro Tabata’s research into battery materials. Triporous can be used to filter air, clean water and eliminate odours more effectively than activated carbon. Applications so far include shampoo bottles and garments, the latter of which are displayed at Waste Age. Then there is Original Blended Material, made from recycled waste paper, bamboo and sugarcane. Durable, strong and plastic-free, Sony has begun using it instead of its traditional plastic to package its noise-cancelling headphones.
Disegno caught up with Tako and Sony Design Centre Europe senior producer Philip Rose, to discuss designing Sony’s more sustainable future.
Disegno Sony is known for electronics, but Triporous has applications in all sorts of things, including fabrics and garments. How did you end up in this space?
Hirotaka Tako Triporous is a really unique material. Our engineer was working with rice husks while researching materials for batteries, and discovered that this type of carbonisation has deodorant qualities. He decided to focus on creating the material, instead of his original mission. He and his team successively ran a really small pilot. Then they moved to applications. The first one was a collaboration with a Japanese deodorant company on a shampoo bottle, with the Triporous inside. If you wash using it, it’s six times cleaner, even getting more odour out. That was the first trial. Then after two years they developed lots of different collaborations, on masks, underwear, socks, t-shirts. One is with Issey Miyake, to make a unique clothing collection [the Type-1 collection, which launched in 2021, ed.]. For Waste Age, we presented our unique material to the curators because it’s literally material made from waste. It’s pure waste. Burning mountains of rice husks is one of the biggest problems in creating CO2. Because we are Japanese and we eat rice a lot, I felt very guilty! If you are eating the rice and wearing the t-shirts, it’s a good story.
“Normally, an initial application comes first, and then we develop the material or product for it. But this processes was the opposite.”
Disegno I imagine with the deodorising properties, that also means you need to wash items less — we’re only now realising that washing is damaging the environment by releasing micro-plastic particles.
Hirotaka Normally, an initial application comes first, and then we develop the material or product for it. But this processes was the opposite. We found the super-material — which is sustainable, unique and not artificial — first. And then we tried to find the applications later, with creative brainstorming. It could be used to clean water and air, for deodorant, in cleaning, in carpets, even fabric for the sofa. So now we have this huge potential in front of us.
Disegno It’s lovely to see the prototypes of Original Blended material, made from sugarcane, bamboo and paper. When did that process begin? When did Sony make that decision that clamshells and blister packs weren’t sustainable going forward?
Hirotaka It was a huge effort. Plastic packaging is a huge issue we have. We felt we had a responsibility at Sony for the long-term development of a new material. So recycling and sustainability came first. But we developed this material in the same way as we would when creating a totally unique, beautiful product. We intentionally discussed what a beautiful sustainable material would look like. The material we made in the end perfectly matches with the beauty of the three different ingredients. Working out the percentage of each, and then graphically applying them into one material was really, really tough. And once you have made the material itself, you need to make it into real packaging, that can be different thicknesses, different durabilities, different colours. That whole journey was a learning process for us.
Philip Rose It is quite unique. Most recycled paper does need some virgin paper put into it for strength, but the paper that we’re using is already second or third generation when we take it on. When you pulp it down it has such fine fibres that it has no mechanical strength. So it’s been a two or three year process to get the composition right without the need for additional virgin material.
“We started with Asia, finding the mountains and the right kind of bamboo to make the perfect packaging for the Asian market. ”
Disegno Did you have to comply with any laws about blending those materials?
Philip There's a lot of legislation that we had to go through. And there's quite a few hundred varieties of bamboo as well! So yes, selecting the right one and getting through that legislation was also a big part of this.
Hirotaka This material is still a prototype, even though its on sale as packaging. Because one of the purposes of this recyclable, sustainable material is for localised, closed circular economies. If it’s sold in Europe, it needs to be made in Europe, and the same with other parts of the world. We started with Asia, finding the mountains and the right kind of bamboo to make the perfect packaging for the Asian market. But of course we cannot use this packing worldwide [and call it] sustainable. Our ultimate goal is a closed, perfect circulation and the production process.
Disegno It’s interesting that you say it needs to be beautiful as well as functional, even though it’s something that’s going to be thrown away. Is that in order to endear people to sustainable materials?
Hirotaka Yes, the story itself is a part of the development of the material. I believe that is part of the beauty in design and creating. Every kind of paper is a different material and has a different story to tell. It’s really lucky for us to create the material by ourselves, inserting the story of a sustainable future into a small package.
Disegno Will it be rolled out to other Sony products in the future?
Hirotaka Yes, of course. We have to study more because it's still at the conceptual stage. We need to investigate more how to apply it to different sizes and kinds of products. But we are trying to develop it more and more.
Philip And fundamentally to eliminate plastics. But we have a number of different approaches to do that. This is maybe not the panacea for all.
“If you are alone, the forest is quite dark. But if you go there with a friend, the light doubles. It’s about getting together and making new life.”
Disegno Let’s talk about Life from Light, your installation in Waste Age. What as the brief?
Hirotaka The museum and ourselves at Sony have a long history as friends. We’ve always talked about opportunities to collaborate together, and Waste Age came up. The curators picked up the two materials, then they decided to give us a commission [for the installation]. The original brief was an intro. We wanted to create a huge, impactful message through our interactive content: how the amount of waste will swell, how our lives will be impacted by the waste, how the waste is going to eat you. It was a scary message. But Justin changed his mind last minute. We did something on the outro instead. He wanted to create something positive, a message for the audience to take home. I agreed: let’s make a tiny hope. The piece starts in the dark before dawn in the forest. And then you can see the future, and the hope, and the optimism in the forest. I brought in the idea of light, because light is a signature sign of civilisation. Light can be represented in this interaction as a womb for the making of life. And then by working together, with fungi and mycelium, we can create a unique life form. Sometimes it looks like fungi, sometimes like a weird object from the ground. It’s actually random, because its a real-time rendering. So we created a 360° forest. You can go anywhere. You can see the whole forest in an hour if you stand still. And you can walk around as if you’re in a deep forest; a camera on the ceiling captures your movement. We watched a Netflix documentary, Fantastic Fungi. It gave us a mutual understanding about how a rotten tree in the forest can create new life. One trick we wrote into the interactive content is that if you are alone, the forest is quite dark. But if you go there with a friend, the light doubles. If you are with a four-person family, the light is four times brighter. It’s about getting together and making new life.
Disegno I was going to say it looks like being in a video game. So it’s interesting that you actually used a game engine to generate it. How many people can be in the room interacting with it at the same time?
Hirotaka Originally it could be 10, 20, 30. But we realised the graphic engine was burning out. So we decided to set seven people, because space itself is kind of limited for people running around. And then we found the right number to enjoy.
“As someone who’s grown up as an industrial designer through the boom of the plastics age, plastics has given us so many wonderful things, and so many possibilities for a designer. But obviously it has downside as well.”
Disegno Was there anything that you saw by other exhibitors that you thought was particularly interesting, that you would take to your work?
Hirotaka I'm a really big fan of the search for unique, sustainable materials by designers, because sometimes that becomes an art piece. The border between art and design, and design and engineering now is really broad. This Waste Age exhibition challenges that question itself, because beauty has nothing to do with sustainability issues. But sometimes designers can find a way to present both in one piece. I liked the piece from Studio Drift, Materialism, where they take a product like the Volkswagen Beetle, dissemble it, melt it down and turn each substance into a cube. The silhouette looks like a cityscape. They lay them in the precise location in the original object — the tire, the seat. But sometimes you can see a kind of super-layer of metal in the small pieces. And my other favourite is Baux, who make acoustic products from recycled material. It’s really beautiful. We decided to use the material for our innovation office.
Philip I think they're my favourite: the exhibition was more thought-provoking rather than material resourcing for me. As someone who's grown up as an industrial designer through the boom of the plastics age, plastics has given us so many wonderful things, and so many possibilities for a designer. But obviously it highlights the downside as well. The love and the hatred for plastic all in the same exhibition.
Disegno It’s a kind of complicated 360 that everyone is expected to go through! It's a really miraculous material, but now we see the downsides.
Hirotaka In the Peak Waste section of the exhibition, there is one screen showing one scene from The Graduate, where someone says to Dustin Hoffmann: “plastic is the future”.
Philip I remember there was that book by Sylvia Katz, Plastics (1978). It was all so fantastic — we were all going to live in a plastic future. And it's gone full circle.
Images Sony
Words Joe Lloyd