New waste design business Anti designed a series of table and desk lamps made of discarded, lost and broken umbrellas.
While certainly handy when it rains, umbrellas, especially cheap ones, are not designed to last for longer than six months. After that, they generally break or are torn apart by the wind. That is, if you haven’t left it in a store or the train before. Worldwide, one billion umbrellas are broken, lost or otherwise discarded each year. Umbrellas are deemed problematic to recycle due to the complex construction and combincation of different materials. The nylon canopies do not biodegrade, and the metal amounts to 240,000 tons of waste per year.
Anti dedicated itself to ‘harnessing waste as a free resource’, to create circular products. Their first product is a series of table and desk lamps made from discarded umbrellas to combat the waste problem.
The collected umbrellas are disassembled and sorted by materials groups, including plastics, metals and nylon. In the assembly of the lamps, some technical functions of the umbrella was maintained. For example, the folding arms have been repurposed into an articulating arm of the lamp, the umbrella plastic runner repurposed into a lampholder, the nylon canopy repurposed into a fabric lampshade for the table lamp. In addition, the lamps are designed to be easier to disassemble at the end of life than the original umbrella.
Images: Anti