The threat of new materials

The launch of a new and experimental material feels like a daily occurrence. There seems to be no waste stream that isn’t fodder for potential new materials. Many years ago it started with wood chips mixed with plastic; now it’s anything from algae to tea leaves, Hackney street dirt to pineapple leaves. There are so many crafty innovations, it’s almost impossible to keep up.

Various initiatives, such as the European Green Deal and Ellen Macarthur  Foundation’s Global Commitment programme and a projected tripling of the green materials market - from USD 330 billion in 2024 to over USD 1 trillion by 2034 - are driving rapid material innovation.

Powerful incentives like these go some way to explain the current wave of these new and agile materialologists and designers taking material matters into their own hands. Their popularity lies partly in their alignment with consumer demand for environmentally responsible design and in the appeal of origin stories steeped in craft and localism.

While it could be tempting to dismiss all of these boutique materials as a good, old-fashioned hype, once you take a closer look at the ideas that underpins them, some interesting trends and directions start to emerge that can influence the bigger and arguably the more impacting corporate mass-produced plastics industries.

If we look at the mainstream plastics industry innovations, they of course have their initiatives based on reusing previously ignored waste resources. From an environmental point of view, any initiative that keep plastic out of the open environment must be seen as essentially a good thing. Pioneers like Parley for the Oceans and Ocean Cleanup are impressive for the level of awareness that they have managed to raise around plastic waste, as well as for offering a fresh perspective and potential solution to this environmental crisis. More recently, progressive brands like On Running -look out for my interview with the VP of Design—have started experimenting with recycled materials drawing from an ever-wider pool of potential sources of raw materials. This would include CleanCloud, a foam material used in the brand’s Cloudprime concept running shoe. This product is not yet in the market, but very interesting nevertheless as the foam it uses is post-industrial recycled CO2 captured at factories. It’s fair to say that we have only seen the beginning of this boom in plastic recycling and it will evolve as we continue to re-evaluate what was previously seen as useless waste and explore ways to turn it into valuable resources.

Besides typically having a significantly lower carbon footprint, renewable plastics also offer another area of innovation. Again they can also often be a drop-in alternative to conventional petrochemical-based materials. Drop-in renewable alternatives have the added benefit of often being chemically identical to their petrochemical-based counterparts, meaning that they can be recycled together with other plastic waste of the same kind without separation – a big plus.

The plastic innovations however also come with drawbacks. Renewable plastic volumes are still limited that any material that uses edible plants in their production doesn’t pose a direct threat to food production yet. One potential way to future-proof renewable plastics would be to exclusively use non-edible waste materials such as used cooking oil, agricultural waste or waste from the forest industry and other sources that are not in direct competition with food production. Philips, for example, uses polypropylene made from post-industrial cooking oil waste in its Eco Conscious appliance range.

So where does this leave us? Many of the new materials featured in this article are impressive feats of scientific innovation, not to mention the many beautiful and inspiring applications that they have been used in. Undoubtedly there is an appetite for new and innovative materials among designers, brands and consumers, especially if they are addressing environmental and ethical concerns. Combine this with a promising outlook for a growing market it’s safe to say that we haven’t seen the end of this trend by a long way.

Going back to new boutique, hipster, material start-ups, which although are absolutely relevant and worthy, typically come with their own, unique set of challenges, perhaps most commonly around circularity in conventional recycling and scalability. In the vast majority of cases, production volumes of new materials have a long way to go to match the scale and efficiency of ‘legacy’ materials. They are two sides of the same coin, inspiring and influencing each other. New material start-ups can learn a lot from established suppliers about efficiency, scalability and consistency, for example. On the other hand, start-ups offer a fresh perspective on material experimentation with raw materials, aesthetics and overall user experience.

In my design studio, where we are surrounded by hundreds of boutique materials, our approach to material innovation for global automotive, appliance, and electronics brands is straightforward: The greatest challenge for any large company is the commercialisation of a new material. There are simply too many obstacles - too much risk, too high a cost. If the goal is real impact, the smarter path is often to work with existing materials in new ways - whether through process innovation or by repurposing materials across industries. Among all categories, plastics offer the greatest potential for transformative application.

The next article in this series will look at exactly that – what happens when we re-evaluate legacy plastics with a start-up mindset? In many cases, we think we know these materials inside out, but the scope for innovation with these supposedly well-known materials can be surprising. The best material suppliers are using this insight to stay relevant and to survive the threat of new materials.