Blue Planet, Green Ideas | Combining Recycled Plastic and Elegance

Stools, planters, flower vases, fruit bowls: in their Montreal workshop, the designers at Cyrc demonstrate, one colorful object at a time, that plastic can also be recycled into high-end items.

“I put the material in the machine, and this column allows me to stack different colors that come out in the same order. It allows us to make gradients,” explains designer Guy Snover, showing how the small plastic recycling line installed in Cyrc’s premises works.

We are on the fifth floor of Ateliers 3333, an old industrial building on Boulevard Crémazie Est converted into spaces for artists and artisans.

The windows of this large corner room offer a contrasting view: on one side, the traffic jams of the Metropolitan highway, on the other, the verdant Mount Royal.

In between, Guy Snover and his partner Daniel Martinez are working hard to give a second life to a type of plastic used for food packaging, polylactic acid, known by the English acronym PLA. With this humble material rescued from waste, they create high-end items for the home (stools, poufs, plant pots, fruit bowls, flower vases, etc.).

We wanted to show what can be done with trash can materials and raise awareness of plastic.

Daniel Martinez, co-founder of Cyrc

Demonstration made: around sixty shops, including several museums in large American cities such as Miami, San Francisco and San Diego, now sell their objects. Wall Street Journal recently recommended one of their products in their short list of five “beautiful large lightweight planters.”

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Each item is individually made to order on the dozen or so 3D printers that hum around the workshop. Smaller items, like fruit bowls and vases, are ready in two to three hours. Larger items, like stools and poufs, take 24 hours.

“3D printing takes time,” says Martinez.

This is because printing is done line by line, with hot-extruded recycled PLA filament.

Over the past two years, the two artisan designers have sold more than 2,000 objects, totaling more than 800 kg of recycled PLA.

For now, they mainly use filament from a Dutch supplier, who sources PLA from food packaging collected by a recycler in the Benelux region. Unfortunately, they have not yet found an equivalent on this side of the Atlantic.

“The quality that exists in North America is not the same,” laments Mr. Martinez, citing the consistency of the material, the choice of colors and the complete traceability from food packaging.

Continuous improvement

In the absence of a local supplier, the founders of Cyrc decided to give a second life to their own materials. That’s why they set up their small recycling line last fall, with the help of a SODEC innovation grant.

Defective items, prototypes, leftover filament, everything goes. The company also undertakes to take back its own products for recycling, if customers no longer want them.

The result is not only ecological, but aesthetic. Their recycling chain allows them to produce filament with shades of color that are not available on the market, with which they manufacture single-run objects.

It’s like cooking a recipe: they are unique, because I don’t get exactly the same result every time.

Guy Snover, co-founder of Cyrc

The original materials, which must first be shredded, can also be processed into pellets.

“That’s the next project,” Martinez said, pointing to a new 3-D printer being assembled. “It doesn’t use filament, just pellets, which is easier to make recycled products.”

The two partners carry out a lot of testing to develop products and processes.

The PETG (polyethylene terephthalate glycol) plastic they tried early on worked well, but the products were transparent, which customers liked less than the matte PLA items, which they considered “fancier for the home.”

As for the famous PET (polyethylene terephthalate), used in particular for water bottles, “when you print with that, the material tends to deform if the temperature is not constant, so you have to print in a closed system. The machine that we would need costs around $100,000,” notes Mr. Martinez.

While larger objects take longer to print, they allow more plastic to be reused.

“We would like to make things like tables or chairs, with a good design, but we would need bigger machines.”

In the meantime, the Montreal studio is working on collaborations that could give its mission more visibility. A line of home objects designed by star designer Karim Rashid is set to launch in a few months. Another collaboration with a New York museum will be announced in November.

“We are concerned about aesthetics and materials, but, more importantly, about allowing the population to not produce more waste, and encouraging companies to adopt a circular model,” concludes Mr. Martinez.

Visit the Cyrc website