Brandon Chow

The Harvest lamp is manufactured completely from existing waste streams, these being rice hulls, recycled PET and post industrial aluminium and brass scrap. It is adjustable for both shade rotation and linear position with a brass thumb screw controlling this movement. When the lamp is turned on via the brass dimmer switch, the rice hull ash glass shade is illuminated, showing off the unique optical qualities of the glass, calling upon itself as the centrepiece of the design.

The scale of the global homewares industry is enormous. IKEA alone uses 1% of the worlds wood, creating a Billy bookcase every 3 seconds. Much of this furniture has a short lifecycle due to poor quality and low prices, affording consumers the financial mobility to change their home furnishings to match current trends. The vast majority of this furniture is designed with a ‘cradle to grave’ lifecycle, in which valuable resources are extracted from the natural world, manufactured into useable products and then are eventually disposed usually either in a landfill or incinerated

A possible solution to the problem of homewares consumption is to redesign them to follow a ‘cradle to cradle’ lifecycle. This means that when a product reaches the end of its useful life, it is able to be broken down and remade into new iterations of itself with little to no degradation, thus creating a closed loop product lifecycle, significantly reducing the amount of landfill we produce. This lifecycle can be further improved when we consider manufacturing from existing waste streams, as this gives life to raw materials that would otherwise be sent to landfills. This gives rise to the research question, how might we reuse agricultural waste materials to develop sustainable lighting?

Rice hulls are the coatings of individual grains of rice that protect them from the elements. Annually around the world, 30 million tons of rice hull ash (RHA) have to be disposed of and due to their low bulk density, they can cause both environmental and human health related issues. This provides us with an opportunity to use this ash for something useful. When it is used in concrete, it can replace cement, an extremely environmentally harmful material by up to 50%. As the ash is mostly silica it can also be melted into a glass with unique and attractive optical properties. Both these materials are recyclable and follow a closed loop lifecycle.

The lamp is able to build a strong personal connection with its user by creating a sense of uniqueness between lamps. The unfinished brass touch points will patina over time and each glass shade will have inherent differences in pattern. This will protect it from design obsolescence as the user is less likely to throw away something they are attached to. It will extend the lifecycle of the lamp meaning less energy will be used in recycling and remanufacturing.

The goal of the Harvest Lamp is to bring about a cultural shift in the way we see waste. By using waste materials to make homewares, it will create a conversation about what role waste plays in our society and I hope that in the future it will lead to cradle to cradle homewares becoming the norm.