Said to be the first 100 per cent recycled cladding material, the Pretty Plastic shingles by the Dutch studios Overtreders W and Bureau SLA have been used on a permanent building for the first time.

According to the website, Pretty Plastic is “a cladding material that gives discarded building products a second life. Made of old window frames, downspouts, and rain gutters, Pretty Plastic shows that waste can become beautiful.” You can find the material in our library here.

The shingles are made out of 100 per cent upcycled PVC plastic collected from waste from the building sector. The shingles are installed with a single screw and are available in 9 shades of grey, though there are plans to extend the range of colours in the future.

The project started when Reinder Bakker, Hester van Dijk and Peter van Assche of Bureau SLA and Overtreders W got their hands on a shipping container full of household plastic in early 2015. To give the plastic a new and better life, they developed their own machine park called the Pretty Plastic Plant. This machine park produced more than a thousand unique tiles, which were used for exclusive interior design projects.

In 2017, the cladding was used for the so-called People’s Pavilion, as part of the Dutch Design Week (read more about this project here). The shingles were produced by the Belgium recycling company Govaplast.

In 2019, the plastic tiles received fire certificate class B (very difficult to burn) according to NEN-EN 13501-1.

In January this year, the first new building with the cladding was delivered, an annex for the Sint Oelbert School in Oosterhout, the Netherlands. The building will be used as a music pavilion and was designed by Grosfeld Bekkers van der Velde Architecten.

Photos via PrettyPlastic