Newspaper Wood: Turn Pages into Recycled Home Products
Mieke Meijer has already shown that logs are not necessarily cut-and-dried wood, literally or otherwise, but in this next chapter his new material idea takes shape in the form of actual furniture, lamps, jewelry and other physical (and useful) objects.
It began as a student design project – stacks of newspapers meticulously and individually glued together, rolled into a tight ‘log’ and left to dry, deform and harden just like living trees would do. After they ‘cure’ these building blocks can be cut, carved, routed, mortised and so forth as one would with normal wood.
Years later, in collaboration with the Dutch design ground Vij5, Mieke began to roll out real products based on these reconstituted pieces of ‘timber’ … the result: a series of practical and experimental items that make structural and/or aesthetic use of recycled newspapers in new ways.
NewspaperWood has grains and rings much like a tree, as well as a unique and variegated texture akin to that of wooden-surfaced craft objects.
Each slice or spin reveals different cross-sections of print with its own visual (as well as structural) properties.
With missing production, assembly, marketing and sales components met by his partners, one wonders if a truly different mass-market material may have just been born.
“NewspaperWood reverses a traditional production process; not from wood to paper, but from (news)paper to wood. When a NewspaperWood log is cut, the layers of paper appear like wood grain or growth rings of a tree and therefore resemble the aesthetics of real wood.”
“NewspaperWood is the result of a 2003 project of Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Mieke Meijer. After partnering with Vij5 in 2007 and the presentation of the material at its infancy in 2011, they recently decided to join forces in a new company to take the material to the next level.”
“NewspaperWood BV is dedicated to the production and development of the NewspaperWood material in order to find new intermediate products and innovative applications.”
