Tag Archives: circular materials

Circular Material for Creative Industries: The Emerging Bioplastics

This is a research activity related to MaDe – Material Designers International Project. MADEC contributes to the project, the research activity, and workshops in the Politecnico di Milano. Our contribution mainly deals with Circular Materials for Creative Industries.

The project MaDe is run by the organizations Elisava, Ma-tt-er, and Politecnico di Milano and is funded by Creative Europe. MaDe is a competition, an event series, and a platform devoted to realizing the positive impact material designers can have across all creative sectors.

Material Designers are agents of change. They can design, redesign, reform, reuse, and redefine materials giving them an entirely new purpose. Increasing the potential of materials they can go on to research, advise, educate and communicate what materials are and can be in the immediate, near, and far future. These actions have the ability to implement positive social, economical, political, and environmental change across all sectors, towards a more responsibly designed future.

MADEC’s contribution addresses in MaDe the topic of the acceleration of the transition towards Circular Economy. This means the reorganization of product manufacturing on sustainability principles to reduce environmental footprint. In this problematic scenario, the topic of Circular Material research is fundamental for both consolidated enterprises and Creative Industries.
Pursuing the intent to give insight, after having briefly highlighted the connection between Creative Industry and design, the MADEC’s contribution clarifies the relationship among CE, sustainability, and material innovation, and present a number of bio-based plastics already developed and placed on the market thanks to giving voice to innovator sensibility and design research awareness according to EU Plastics Strategy.

In the transition toward the Circular Economy process, Design is called In this process, Design is called from the process beginning to establish a new relationship between resources and production.
Focusing on Circular Materials we have analyzed two success stories of Creative industries that have developed news circular materials and highlighting the role of the design-driven material innovation approach and its advisable implementation in CIs. These are Mogu, in Italy, and Sulapac in Finland.

The contribution to this issue is published in:

Ferrara, M. (2021) Circular Material for Creative Industries: The Emerging Bioplastics. In L. Clèries, V. Rognoli, S. Solanki, P. Llorach
Material Designers. Boosting talent towards circular economies (pp. 52-59) Barcelona: Creative Europe. ISBN 978-84-09-24439-3.