A total of eight designers and four local workshops have materialized some twenty prototypes to illustrate that waste can be turned into a resource.

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The new edition of LOOP Design and Circularity

The Institute for Business Innovation of the Balearic Islands (IDI), an entity under the Ministry of Enterprise, Employment and Energy, presents a new edition of LOOP Design and Circularity, the platform that reflects on circularity, reuse, transformation and proximity of materials to incorporate them into the conceptualization of new products and thus optimize the resources around us.

After initiatives focused on promoting the design and research of new materials, LOOP Design and Circularity now brings to the table the need to convert waste into a source of resources to develop new products, in short, to apply circularity to give value to what is initially rejected. And it does so through the Fundació Deixalles and its project “Fem que circuli”, which posed a challenge to IDI, to offer a new life to the materials collected in the domestic, business and hotel environment.

From here, IDI, through LOOP, proposed the creation of sustainable and circular solutions from available resources and with design as a discipline capable of adding value. To this end, it commissioned designers to materialize new products with the waste collected by Deixalles. The result has been some twenty prototypes created by eight designers with Deixalles’ post-consumer material and made by four local workshops.

Of the different materials collected by Deixalles, the LOOP project targeted textile and furniture products. Specifically, it focused on the hotel sector, which is characterized by a high turnover of these items. Thus, the design proposals can be classified into:

• More functional products for hotel employees, such as aprons or personalized shirts.
• Products focused on the customer experience that add value and comfort to rooms and common areas, such as luggage racks, chairs or armchairs for common areas.
• Products that can be sold in the hotel itself as a solution to dispose of discarded fabrics. This more commercial approach seeks to make the customer feel part of the project by giving him or her a practical souvenir, such as a beach bag.

The designers who have created new products are Cecilia Sörensen, Nicolás Guevara, Anabel Ribas, Margarita Payeras (Corcho Swimwear), Paula Chacártegui, Jandro Bonet, Adriane Escarfullery, Amarar Tramuntana and Sara Regal.

The collaboration that has been promoted between IDI, Fundació Deixalles and the designers incorporates the production workshops. In this case, all participants are local workshops, a fundamental part of the economy of the area and an essential tool for the development of circular production, as well as for the social and labor insertion of vulnerable groups through the reuse of objects and waste.

The workshops that have participated in this edition of LOOP are the Taller Tèxtil de la Fundació Deixalles, the Taller Tèxtil Es Ministeri, the Fusteria MAC Insular and the Fusteria Ebenisteria Escaire.

To carry out the designers’ prototypes, different materials have been used, such as bed base slats, reused wood, towels, beach hammock canvas, curtains, awning canvas, foscurit fabric, sheets and mattress fabric, among others.

LOOP has also promoted research into new materials. Through an agreement between the IDI and the University and Business Foundation of the Balearic Islands (FUEIB-UIB), a textile research line has been launched. Applying the principle that everything is a resource, the Research Group of Architectural Constructions and Building Engineering of the UIB has opened a line of research from these local waste materials to develop rigid blocks obtained by cold pressing, made from shredded recycled clothing and natural binders for insulation. The challenge is to compact the clothing as thermal insulation for buildings. The initial product developed incorporates an environmentally friendly organic binder that provides properties such as cohesion and fire resistance.