The Process: Müll

by Carter Zufelt

Utah-based industrial designer Carter Zufelt hated seeing plastic bags littering his favorite hikes, so he developed a process to turn them into beautiful, useful design objects. The resulting product line, Müll, features dice, rings, desk organizers, and other objects — each with a unique marbled texture. We asked Zufelt to share a bit about the environmental motivations behind the project and the relentless experimentation that went into developing the process.

Inspiration
This project began two years ago for my senior project in industrial design as I noticed the alarming amount of plastic trash in the environment. I did some research and found that each year one trillion bags are consumed worldwide, and only 5 percent of those bags are recycled. This leaves roughly 95 billion bags in the environment every year. To put this into perspective, if those bags were lined up end to end, they would wrap around the world over 1,200 times!

I began to pay closer attention to the area where I live and realized that plastic trash really is everywhere. Bags often get caught in trees, bushes, gutters, and other similar places. Not a lot of people will throw a laundry detergent or soda bottle away because they’re big and people are generally conscious of recycling them. They’re way more apt to toss a plastic bag because they think, “oh, it’s so thin — it’s just going to deteriorate.” But of course it doesn’t — it will stay in the environment for thousands of years. Plastic bags slip through the cracks. I began collecting the bags that I came across and figuring out how to use them in my design work.

Experimentation
The experimentation phase of the project was messy and time consuming. It took months of experimentation, with many failed attempts. I started by holding an actual flame to a plastic bag and immediately regretted this — tufts of smoke were emitted and the unusable black plastic dripped uncontrollably to the ground. I changed course and tried smoking the plastic, pressing it, heating it in tubes, dripping, compressing, folding… I tried everything that seemed remotely logical, and even some things that didn’t. Each failure helped me understand how the plastic behaved and what I needed to change the next time around.

I really started to gain traction when I decided to invest in a seven-dollar cupcake crust maker from a local thrift store. It had a positive and negative form, which were made of ¼” steel, and four places to insert the crust. Those plates got hot enough to bake crust, so I figured they might get hot enough to melt and form the plastic. I took it home, jammed plastic into the cavity, forced it shut, and flipped the switch. I left it on for a minute or two, and when I opened the latch, I was pleased to find that the plastic bags had bonded to each other in the rough shape of the form. I refined the process by using non-stick cooking spray as a mold release and figured out the right timing and number of bags. Slowly, the experimentations progressed until I finally had a satisfying end result: a full block of beautiful, swirled recycled plastic.

Refinement and Concept
I furthered the process by melting the plastic in an oven at a designated temperature. It took more iterations to make sure that the temperature was safe and effective. Overheating the plastic produced undesirable results and underheating hardly affected the plastic at all. After finding the settings I found that I could twist, fold, and compress the tacky plastic to obtain a wonderful aesthetic. The trick is what you do to the plastic when it is moldable. I continued to refine until I was satisfied with the different colors and patterns that each piece contained.

There are no dyes, no bleaching, and no colors added. Nothing is mixed in to bind the plastic bags to each other. The colors and patterns come entirely from the colors of the bags and the process I developed. I found these patterns to be beautiful and decided to showcase them in my designs. After performing strength tests I realized that the plastic behaves similarly to wood. It was extremely strong, durable, impact resistant, and could be shaped with traditional woodworking tools.

I went back to the drawing board to map out my plan of action and decided to make several products: organizational devices, dice, rings, and cubes. I liked the visual story that these told and hoped that upon seeing the finished pieces, people would be inspired to recycle.

I decided to name this project Müll, a German word that means “trash.” During my research I found that Germany, Austria, and Switzerland lead the world in recycling efforts. It would be wonderful if we could adopt some of their practices here in the States.

You can support Carter Zufelt’s Müll campaign until it wraps up on April 6th. Check out our Design category to discover more inventive projects from Kickstarter’s creative community.