WASTED//BROKEN//GROWN is where I am serialising my most recent two books Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020 – now sold out in book form) and Broken: Mending & Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023) and where I will be publishing the final book in the trilogy, Grown: Design That Gives Back, but only with your support. Subscribe and upgrade to paid to get all three books delivered to your inbox, chapter by chapter, and to support me in writing the third book.
‘Nobody needs another egg cup, but maybe what we do need is awareness about waste and our own consumption habits,’ says designer Basse Stittgen (1990, Hannover, Germany). His tableware and home accessories collection, How Do You Like Your Eggs?, is made entirely from eggshells and egg whites that would otherwise be discarded. Motivated by a fascination with materiality, Stittgen founded his multidisciplinary studio in 2017 to question both production and consumption. ‘Traditionally, designers work with materials and processes that are handed to them, with limited knowledge about their environmental impacts,’ he says. ‘We must become more aware of the consequences of our choices – as consumers and producers. We share a responsibility, but to truly shoulder that responsibility, we also need to share knowledge. Production processes are often not visible to consumers, so with this project I am trying to reconnect production and consumption.’
‘Nobody needs another egg cup, but maybe what we need is awareness about waste and our own consumption habits.’
The knowledge Stittgen wants to share is that 6.6 billion hens lay an average of 1.1 trillion eggs every year. Eggs are checked for damage, dirt and deformations and any that don’t pass muster, known as ‘b-stock eggs’, are turned into dried-egg products or mayonnaise by large farms or—in the case of smaller farms lacking the scale to make such products viable—simply discarded. Eggs have a short shelf life and a fragile shell, so even some of those that do make it to the shops take their place among the one-third of all food that is wasted annually worldwide.
