Found by Oscar Diaz

Contemporary cutlery can be a trap for aspiring designers – something simple, everyday and universally used that is often overdesigned with unecessary gimmicks. Colored flatware can be nice, stainless silverware is durable, but as one designer demonstrates: neither is necessary when one can simply cut their own unique cutlery from an old used plastic bottle and coat it with metal.

Cutlery made of plastic bottles

Much like a furniture designer selecting the right piece of wood from which to construct an object, Oscar Diaz looks for those parts of plastic bottles with the right form that will allow him to transform them into creatively recycled tableware like forks, knives and spoons.

Reclaimed plastic tableware

The results of this up cycled plastic flatware project look as much like found or folk art as they do high design – copper-and-tin-plated flatware sets, each unique in origin and shape. Whether or not these are truly eco-friendly after such processing is a good question, but at the very least they get people thinking about creative new ways to reuse old everyday objects.

“‘Found’ is the project by London based designer Oscar Diaz for ‘Airmail,’ an exhibition which opens at IDEA GENERATION Gallery during the London Design Festival 2009.”

plastic tableware close up

“Since there is so many shapes already available, with each brand fighting to be seen on the shelves, Oscar’s approach has been to work more as an editor rather that a designer, and just select the bottles for their shapes to make the cutlery set.”

“The parts were selected so the cutlery is easy to pick up from the table and performs like any other cutlery. The design process  starts on the supermarket were the bottles are selected by their curves. The use of those available shapes, allows a small batch production without the need any mould. Each set is unique due to the hand-cut nature of each piece.”