This 3D printing system converts waste sawdust into stunning wooden lamps and guitars, Desktop Metal’s sawdust-printing outfit allows individual designers and large manufacturers to print elaborate wooden objects. Source: ZD Net
Hagen Hinderdael, a London-based firm that works at the intersection of sustainable design, architecture and innovative technology cannot sell enough of its US$2,160 lamps dubbed the ‘Cocoon’.
Firm co-founder Sofia Hagen says that they’ve been disappearing as quickly as they have arrived on to the shelves of global design shops such as Hoettges Windows in Vienna and Minotti in London, as well as the company’s own pop-up store in Piccadilly Arcade.
The lamp could easily be a mid-century-modern showpiece, painstakingly hollowed out of a block of expensive hardwood, perhaps mahogany or teak, with a marble-like finish and hand-crafted to polished perfection.
Except, it isn’t.
Not only is the lamp not made out of premium wood, but its raw material also lies on the other side of lumber’s quality spectrum, the lowliest-of-low by-products that remains one of the biggest environmental scourges around, namely sawdust.
Hagen Hinderdael sent Forust — acquired by 3D printing supremo Desktop Metal in 2019 — its rendering of the lamp and Forust then used sawdust and a binder-jet printer to print it out.
There’s nothing mysterious about 3D printing with all manner of powdered material from ceramic to metal to sand being fashioned into objects of surprising shapes, resilience, and physical integrity. The technology has also had, in a short space of time, not just an impact on industrial manufacturing, but also on supply chains.
But 3D printing has never been hugely successful with wood before, until now.
Forust was formed when Andrew Jeffery, previously president of Boston Ceramics, Virginia San Fratello at the Department of Design at San Jose State University, and Ronald Rael, with the Department of Architecture at the University of California Berkeley, came together and started tinkering around with materials as fellow members of the San Francisco-based 3D collective, Emerging Objects.
The collective has produced stunning pieces of functional art through experimentation with improbable materials, such as salt and recycled tires.
It was only a matter of time before the trio focused on finding a solution to an as-yet, intractable 3D conundrum – how to print wooden objects. Their primary impulse was to package that approach in a sustainable solution. Consequently, Forust’s commercial 3D printing solution aims to mitigate at least a small part of the 84 million tons of sawdust generated by the furniture industry that is either burned or sits on landfill.
