Do you practice circularity in your house?

By this I do not mean do you have a round dining room table – I mean do you believe that the products you use in your daily life can have a life beyond the concept you originally had for them? Can they go on to be reused, repaired, remanufactured and/or upcycled – either by you or by someone else – and not sent off to landfill once you are done with them?

Americans who currently send 12 million tons of furniture a year to landfill are using the rental model to approach the problem (just rent your furniture or furnishings for six months or a year – and then hand them back and rent a different set) but in Europe we are more interested in whether those household goods can be repurposed.

That was the question asked by a fascinating design fair, Material Matters, at the Barge House just behind the Oxo Tower this weekend. The exhibition, which grew out of a podcast, was showcasing the work indivduals, companies and organisations finding new and exciting ways to engage with materials, virgin but sustainable and recyclable, or recycled and repurposed.

I had been told about the show by the lovely designer Ella Doran with whom I am working on a mini project for Hampstead Lane. She was exhibiting a wall painting created out of left over paints, and speaking on circularity at the show.

So what did I find there? Details of all the exhibitors on the fair’s website but just to pick out a few of the most fascinating.

Alkesh Parmar is repurposing orange peel either into a leather like fabric or into paper using the pectin in the peel to give it stability. The ‘fabric’ can be softened by dampening and stiffened by drying out.

The paper is made by pulversing the peel and then rolling it to create a semi translucent drapeable fabric.

His website also shows a clip of how they repurpose champagne corks into lights.

Smile Plastics uses plastic packaging, white goods, recycled plastic bottles and yogurt pots to create 100% recycled and 100% recyclable decorative panels  for homes, office interiors or showrooms. And when they are no longer needed they will take them back and recycle them into new panels.

‘Go’ was a concept by LayerDesign.com for a 3d-printed wheelchair that could be customised to a user’s measurements by mapping biometric information.

Mixed Metals was encouraging visitors to mix and arrange their metal objects to create scenarios of their own while explaining how the metals will change colour depending on the heat to which they are subjected.

Solid Wool chairs are made from the fleece of Herdwick sheep which once was used for carpets but is now considered almost worthless. The wool is combined with a bio resin sourced from waste streams of other industrial processes, such as wood pulp and bio-fuels production to create these chairs.

And finally RootFull – fabric created out of roots grown for the purpose!  An underwater photographer by trade, Zena Holloway became fascinated by root systems and how they could be used to create ‘fabric’ and artefacts. Do watch the short film on her site which explains how it works.

As it happens I also went yesterday to the Cornelia Parker exhibition at Tate Britain – a profoundly political artist who believes in re purposing material objects, usually by blowing them up or crushing them, to discover what lay within them and to allow them to take on new meaning.

It is an amazing show including probably her most famous work Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) for which she enlisted the British Army to help her blow up a typical garden shed packed with all the junk one expects to find in a shed. The debris was then collected and each fragment suspended from the ceiling and lit by a single bulb.

For Thirty pieces of Silver (1988/9) she collected a large quantity of cheap silver plate and had it squashed by a steam roller. The flattened objects were arranged in 30 circular displays suspended close to the ground. Interpret it as you will…

The War Room (2015) is a cavernous structure based on the sumptuous tent in which Henry VIII received François I in the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 and hung with the long strips of red paper from which poppies for the annual Poppy day memorials had been cut.

However, if you are interested (and I found it an absolutely rivetting exhibition) make haste as it finishes on October 16th.