Annually, an average of 6.4 billion hens lay 1.1 trillion eggs. Simultaneously one third of all food per year is lost or wasted which includes eggs that have short shelf life and whose fragile shell is not the most suitable protection against processing and transport.

From domestication over to industrialisation, the value of chicken and their eggs has progressively decreased, the shift in human interaction with animals went from cohabitation to first encountering them dead & dissected served on plates.

In the project ‘How do you like your eggs’ the content becomes container, an egg cup is produced from discarded eggs. It explores the extraordinary materiality of an ordinary item of consumption.

There is an ambiguity in the symbolism of the egg which embodies on the one hand the beginning of life and on the other became swallowed up in cheap consumption.

To address this shift of value and to generate awareness for the waste of eggs on an many scales but also for the consumption habits of the individual, in the project ‘How do you like your eggs’ expired egg whites and shells are thermoformed into bioplastic cups with zero additives. In todays context traditional non-degradable plastics are highly problematic, especially because of our throw-away culture; opposed to that in this project a new, fully degradable bioplastic is used to create a narrative about consumption and waste. This can be seen as a novel approach of how plastic can be a conveyor of meaning rather than a pollutant.

The b-stock and damaged eggs used for this project come from the organic farming project Geluksvogel.

Photos: Donghwan Kam