Building community through creation from waste
Michael Lambuth
Mike Lambuth (aka Michael Douglas Too). Co-founder. 10+ years working in the furniture and interior design industries including working for iconic furniture brand Knoll as well as repairing & refinishing furniture in Boise. Prior to that 7 years working as an environmental chemist and hazardous waste professional. My interests involve creating one-of-a-kind furniture pieces entirely from waste and secondhand materials via an entirely petroleum free process. I enjoy the problem solving nature of the work I do including researching and experimentation with different materials and creating new materials from waste generated in the studio. I am also passionate about community engagement. I like to encourage people to reframe how they view waste and offer ideas as to what can be created from it via classes and workshops.
Lu Antram. Co-founder. I am a self-taught jeweler creating from waste since 2014. Influenced by my surroundings and what waste the both natural and city landscapes have provided me, I have worked with materials from driftwood and discarded animal bones to human hair and metals of all kinds. The past five years I have focused on one material: aluminum. Researching both its environmental and social impacts on humans and the earth from mining and the comparison to its “precious” metal counterparts to the ways to best repurpose and recast this metal. Through my research and practice I have created a zero-petroleum and low-waste casting process for jewelry and objects that I would love to expand into larger architectural pieces. I am passionate about the human impacts of mining and am a proponent of a full stop of it on nearly all metals as I believe there is no way to mine sustainably or ethically and there are an ample amount of resources already extracted existing today to be recycled and reused. My work has always served as a start to the greater conversation of how we interact as humans through the items we consume and the people that create them.
Our proposal is an expansion of what we already do from our studio in Porto, Portugal.
We create furniture and jewelry from waste materials. This work was initiated because we saw the need for drastic change in the furniture and jewelry industries both socially and environmentally. Our work was developed slowly over a 10+ year period through a combination of research and experimentation. Our processes are constantly changing and evolving based upon the things we learn.
On a local level we categorize waste into 2 different groups: waste generated by the community and waste generated by our processes as a studio. We already work with a wide variety of community waste including wood, metal, glass & stone but this doesn’t include everything we come across in and around Porto. This is an area that we would like to grow to include more materials. As far as waste generated from our processes this includes remnants from the waste materials we create with such as sawdust, small blocks, small metal scraps, broken fragments, etc. but this also includes consumables from our processes such as sandpaper, spent clay/sand from casting, degraded graphite crucibles, dross, spent drill bits, product packaging, etc. This is an area where we have made few gains but view as the area of the work we do that needs the most research and testing.
We are proposing to grow our research and experimentation into new materials from waste which can in turn be made into community centered programming for both Porto and the international community. Currently we provide monthly free classes around creation from waste and sustainable materials, paid workshops (with free spaces to increase accessibility) for hands-on creation from waste and we host an Instagram account for community members to share and collect waste materials found around the city. We also offer a studio share program and would like to grow to include a tool library in the future.