Spanish designer Jorge Penadés has moulded with each other shredded leather and natural bone glue to produce pieces of furniture .
Penadés wanted to come up with a new way to recycle leather after turning into mindful of the quantity of leftover materials from the auto, fashion, shoe and furnishings industries.
“I discovered leather specially interesting because it really is the first material in background that people have employed,” he informed Dezeen. “But what genuinely shocked me was the lack of nicely-established recycling processes.”
After substantial research, Penadés came across a procedure that involved shredding leather and then combining it with resin to generate a reconstituted material.
“I could not believe that the only way we are recycling leather is with resin, because in the end you are doing much more harm then assist,” the designer explained. In response, he opted to use animal bone glue as a binder.
“The bones are a bi-product of meat, and are boiled in a bain-marie for a specific amount of time and at a particular temperature,” he explained. “As the water evaporates, you are left with this sort of stone which is then smashed and reveals the glue.”
Penadés initial turned the leather into strips by feeding sheets of the material by means of an office-design paper shredder.
Right after adding the strips to the glue, the mixture is transferred into iron moulds and compressed, then left to set.
Relevant story: Nomadic Furniture by Jorge Penadés
When solidified, the prime layer of the leather is shaved to reveal the marble-like patterns designed by the strips.
“To finish the materials, I utilised shellac which is a normal resin that comes from an insect,” he explained. “Soon after this it is like wood and I can cut it and sand it. The fibres of the leather give it a slightly flexible top quality, but it is pretty stiff.”
Each and every piece is then fixed together and circular brass plates are extra to flip the structures into functional tables.
Seeing the prospective of the materials across numerous industries, Penadés believes the process could be used for creating flooring, tiles and shoe soles.
“I am really looking forward to doing a collaboration with a business, because then the story gets completed,” he advised Dezeen. “Now I’m just producing gallery pieces and not really benefitting anybody.”
The venture, entitled Structural Skin, was on demonstrate as part of the Ventura Lambrate style district in Milan this April, with more designed pieces on display at the DMY Berlin festival that concluded 14 June 2015.
Dutch designer Pepe Heykoop previously responded to the quantity of waste produced inside of the leather market by utilizing odd scraps to upholster current furniture, while College of Arts Utrecht graduate Vera Knoot has developed a new kind of leather from the skin of geese culled in the Netherlands.
